


The Wolf's Backbone

by AshVee



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Anal Sex, Blow Jobs, Dead Scott McCall, F/M, Hand Jobs, M/M, Prostitute Stiles Stilinski, Tags to be added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2018-10-19
Packaged: 2019-02-07 17:04:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 22,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12845607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshVee/pseuds/AshVee
Summary: After being met with doubt from even his own father the night Stiles watches his best friend murdered by a wolfman with red eyes, Stiles runs before they can find him a straight jacket and a nice padded room. Except, the world is a wide open place for a sixteen year old without a high school diploma or anywhere to run. Stiles finds himself in New York City, an... escort for the mundane and supernatural alike.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> AN: I am going to preface this with: I have never written anything like this in my life. I’ve always been a “fade to black” type of writer. I am, at best, demisexual, but lately, I’ve read a few Teen Wolf pieces that go very below the belt and a few that jumped into a future where Stiles never joined the pack and thought...why the hell not? So, I tossed around the idea of a Stiles Stilinski who didn’t have such an easy first step into the supernatural world and what an enterprising sixteen year old runaway might find himself doing for cash and tripped right into prostitute Stiles Stilinski with a twist. I don’t even know what this is anymore.

Friction ridges slid along a sweat-slicked shoulder dotted with sun-spots and beads of perspiration. Moon shadow danced along the delicate column of pale skin adjoining, sliding up and up and up into damp, black hair, thick and riotous from grasping fingers. The same fingers that slid across a sharp jawline and chin, tipping the face up into the poor lighting from the window. 

Full, flushed lips were parted just enough to let whispered breaths past white teeth. A nose crooked enough to speak of a history of breaks tapered up into midnight eyes reflecting the moon’s light back up at the man who had put him on his knees. Well tanned cheeks were pinked, pupils blown impossibly wide, a galaxy within them as the man stared ahead, lost in a world of promises. 

“Good,” a voice said, thick and throaty and confident. “Stay right there.” 

Fingers fell away from where they’d come to rest against the man’s jaw. The moon’s light was blocked as he passed in front of the window, quick and out of sight before the filtered light came again, dancing along cheeks and throat and shoulders down an expanse of damp skin stretched over a chest struggling to draw in slow, easy breaths and down further to tapered hips and the jutting cut of a long-ignored cock. Full and flushed, it wept and bobbled as if the moonlight was enough in absence of touch. 

“This is what you wanted?” the voice asked, a whisper of breath against the man’s ear, warm and cool all at once, the promise of touch but not the reality. 

“Yes,” he sobbed, chest quaking and throat tearing at the word. “Please?” 

“No,” the voice said, easing the agony of the denial by sweeping a fingertip down the line of the man’s spine, slow and sensuous, feeling each nub of bone beneath, running the length of the backbone slowly to rest just at the breach of the man’s ass. “Not yet. You can do better.” 

“I can’t—”

“You can,” the voice said, fingers disappearing entirely from the man’s body. A sob was all that answered, cracked and broken and torn from the depths of the man’s chest. “You will. Say it for me.” 

“I will,” the man said, though the rictus shatter was still in his voice. 

“You will,” the voice confirmed, pleased and thick, syrupy and whispered into a shoulder. Lips, smooth and smiling, mouthed the words again into the skin there before sliding up to press whispered kisses into the man’s throat and behind his ear. “Do you know why no one’s ever seen you like this?” 

“No.” 

“Time,” the voice answered, barely waiting for the whispered admission. “Time and attention to detail.” 

The man keened low as a skilled hand dipped low along the jut of his hip, skimming along his belly before running up the axis of him, between jumping abdominal muscles and miles of skin to rest loosely against the hollow of his throat. A body, naked and hard, angular and corded, pressed against the line of his back from thigh to shoulder, covering every line of him where he knelt, where he’d been kneeling for what felt like days. 

Except, the moon had just risen when he’d knocked on the hotel room door, and still it was high in the sky casting half-hallucinated lines of flesh into view. 

“Your wife is a beautiful woman,” the voice said, pressing just a little at the hips, sliding the man forward bending him into a bow with the hand at his throat keeping his shoulders in place. “How do you fuck her?” 

A keen vibrated through his vocal cords. “We have three kids,” the man panted, a gasped confession. “We don’t have—”

“The time,” the voice said, easing back and leaving the line of his body cold as careful, unhurried hands ran down his shoulders and dipped along his hips. “You adopted?” 

“I couldn’t… we figured if I was…”

“Broken,” the word was spat out, disdain dripping off the words. Both hands pressed hard into the man’s hips, the first solid touch in what felt like hours, slipping around to press him firmly back against him, sitting against the hard line of him. Sure fingers gripped the base of his cock, warm and lingering and slow. “You don’t feel broken.” 

The slide of skin was slick and easy, hips pressed into his, guiding him in a slow, rolling rhythm to fuck forward into the teasing, loose ring of fingers. 

“I’m not,” the man whispered, rutting forward hard once, twice, seeking out more friction than the whirled pads of the fingers and the hot loose grip of the palm allowed. He reached down, gripped that wrist, and snapped his hips forward again, holding the teasing limb in place. “I’m not.” 

The hand flexed around his cock, the friction exquisite for a splintered moment, leaving him rutting into thin air after. He sobbed, bending forward and bracing his hands against the carpeted floor, back on display in the moonlight. The weight against his hips disappeared as he gasped into the carpet. “Please,” he begged, hips canting into nothing. 

“Say it again,” the voice commanded, floating from somewhere behind him, further away than he wanted, than he needed. 

“Please.” 

“Not that.” 

The man gasped, muscles quaking and shivering beneath his skin as the command came again. “I’m not broken,” he finally said. His own cock jumped where he stood against his abdomen, and he looked down the line of his body, rolling his hips and watching with a distant amazement, one that should have worn off but hadn’t. 

“You’re not,” the voice confirmed, once again close, and the hard line of heat pressed into his back, pressing him forward, rocking his hips in a promise. “What do you want?” 

“What?” he asked, lost in the rhythmic rocking, the slide of skin. 

“I can fuck you like this,” the voice promised, and the man behind him shifted, pressing the length of him between his legs. “Or you can learn what it’s like to be buried in someone for the first time in your life.” 

“Yes,” the man said, the word flying off his tongue again and again. He wanted tight heat and punched out gasps beneath him. He wanted to press forward and know he was hard and hot and filling someone. 

“Sit up.” Hands pulled him upright, off of the carpet and backward, to his feet that tingled and burned from the return of blood. He stumbled, caught himself against the window frame. The moon outside was full and promising, lighting the street below as it slid into the distant horizon. He took a breath, pressed his forehead to the cold glass, and turned around. 

The man on the bed was a contrast in shadows, stretched out pale and mole speckled, corded muscle hiding a strength that had held him in place more than once since he’d walked through the hotel door. He was spread out, knees and elbows, and turned so dark whiskey eyes could stare under his arm. 

“Fuck me,” he said in that self same confident command he’d used all night. The voice he’d used to ease and control and coax until a man who’d never been able to fuck his own wife was begging and babbling and so hard for the first time in his life he wondered if it would ever end. 

Before he even knew he’d taken a step, he was kneeling on the bed, sure hands reaching back and under and guiding his hips forward, taking him in hand and lining him up to press into hot, fluttering heat made slick by lubricant and sweat. 

The first few bucks of his hips were instinct and panic spurred on by the pleasure they brought him. A low, almost pained chuckle came from the man beneath him, and he stilled, drew a breath, and tried the slow, easy push and pull his wife had used on him once, when they’d been desperate to try anything that might work. 

The chuckle faded, drawn out by a slow, satisfied noise he wanted to hear over and over again. He did, twice more before the man beneath him bucked back hard, slamming his hips into muscled ass cheeks with one, hard snap. 

“Take,” the man breathed, and as if permission was all he needed, he was letting that instinct take over again, chasing the exquisite feeling of spastic pleasure until he was hunched forward, hips pressed as far as he could force the man, flush against the mattress, rutting over and over in bed with rocking nudges until the burning, coiled part of him snapped. 

The bed, the man, the hotel room and even the moon falling in the sky outside disappeared in a wash of kaleidoscope light. 

He was lost in that pulsing haze for days that could have only been the span of a few breaths, because when he came back to himself, he was still lazily going limp in the man’s ass, his own come wet on his dick and dripping into the duvet. The man beneath him was patient, breathing in deep, contented sighs through his nose as he slowly regained the ability to lift himself off. 

“That…” he tried to find the words to describe the ache in his muscles, the syrupy thick contentment in his bones. “I’ve been missing that my entire life?” 

“Only some of it,” the man said, pushing himself up and off the bed. “Do you think you can remember everything?” 

“I don’t know,” he said, honest with himself. There were expanses of time, stretches in the evening he couldn’t manage to recall what was said, where he was pressed and where he was left raw. 

The man smiled, rolled over the rest of the way, avoiding the pooling mess where he’d laid, and lounged back against the headboard. “You’ve got until the sun comes up to try.” 

Pale skin and honeyed whiskey eyes lay out in front of him, and he ran a hand down his abdomen to where he lay spent. Get on your knees… he heard the whispered command as the shadow of memory and smiled. 

#

Stiles jogged down Riverside Drive, cutting across a little side street and dipping into Central Park, a sweat cooling fast in the New York fall. The sounds of the city faded away as he picked up speed through the Ramble. He ducked by tourists turning maps this way and that, past a nine-to-fiver out to lose himself in the park on his lunch break, quickening his pace until he was sprinting. 

The wood faded around him, the moon was high overhead, and in the distance, he could hear Scott screaming—

“Watch it!” 

He fell, hands scrabbling in underbrush, hastening to push him upright, to get up before whatever had Scott left him gutted and bleeding out in the dead leaves and—

“Hey, hey, it’s alright.” 

He blinked, the sun startling him for a moment before he realized he was sprawled in the fallen leaves and brambles beside one of the smaller paths in Central Park. 

“Jesus,” he muttered, passing a shaking hand over his face and down, sweeping away sweat and nerves. 

“You’re alright.” The statement was comforting, and Stiles just waved a hand at the man he’d collided with before sitting up. It was another jogger, dark haired and green-eyed that stared at him from a few feet away. There was something painfully familiar about the cut of his jaw that threw Stiles six years into the past and too many miles away. 

He forced the vague memory away and stood, brushing leaves from his hands and sucking on a scuff on his palm that oozed sluggishly. 

“I’m good,” he said, standing. “Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going. I was—”

“Somewhere else,” the man said, a faraway look in his eye he shook away a moment later. He nodded, eyeing Stiles up and down for a long moment before apparently deciding he’d be fine, and waved goodbye as he resumed his own jog in the direction Stiles had come from. 

Resigning himself to the jog back, he took a pair of stuttered steps before his ankle protested. He blew out a long suffering sigh, checked his pockets for his phone and keys, and considered the amount of time it was going to take him to get back to his apartment. He didn’t have an appointment for several days, but there were things to accomplish between now and then, things like slogging through the booking requests sitting in his email inbox. 

Walking wasn’t good for his cardiovascular system, but it was for his memory. Without the adrenaline singing in his veins, he could focus on the warmth of the sun instead of the cool of the moon, the crunch of gravel underfoot instead of leaves. 

It had been six years since he’d left Beacon Hills, six years since his best friend died bloody in the woods because he’d lead him there. Six years since his own father had looked at him with wide, horrified eyes when he found him cradling Scott’s body. Officially, an animal had bitten deep into Scott’s abdomen, torn the viscera inside free, and the boy had succumbed to his injuries. Unofficially, Stiles had found Scott, had tried to press the organs back inside in his panic, had held Scott as the last of his gasping, asmathic breaths had fled him, and had stared up into the glowing red eyes of a man with blood in his teeth. 

Words were thrown about over his head for a month before he saw that same man sitting in a nursing home, staring sightessly across the common room. He’d dropped the pitcher he’d been carrying, splashing water up onto his volunteer’s scrubs. Terror raced through his veins, and all he could make out were red eyes. 

His father insisted he talk to a psychologist, and after a week, when no one would do more than smile at him in pity, he ran. 

Stiles Stilinski was just another teenage runaway whose father would never find him. John tried. Stiles knew he tried. There were thirty text messages and his voicemail inbox was full when he finally dumped his cell phone in a dumpster outside of Las Vegas. He’d been staying in a truck stop on I-80W, chatting with anyone who would give him the time of day, trying to talk someone into letting him hitch hike further East, further away, but it had been three days when one of the truckers had told him he’d take him as far as he wanted if his talented tongue could be put to other uses. 

He’d scoffed, flailed a bit for good measure, and three hours later, the sun setting on the horizon, he’d stared at his father’s name on the caller ID, tossed the cell phone into the dumpster, and knocked on the side of the man’s cab. 

He’d been sick after, unused to the thickness of a dick in his throat and unaccustomed to the taste. The trucker had laughed, tossed him a washcloth, and said he’d get used to it. Stiles had rode with the man as far as Chicago that next morning and left him with a knife burried in one of his tires for good measure. 

He’d been right through. 

A shiver raced up his spine as the wind kicked up, and Stiles ducked down into the 84th street subway station. He normally avoided the cramped, underground subway system if only because he didn’t want to pay for a two minute ride he could walk in twenty, but he’d need to make up for lost time if he wanted to get a client lined up for next week. 

His services weren’t cheap, not anymore. His clients now managed to keep him in his two bedroom apartment in Manhattan, and most of the time, he could get buy on two a month. Word travelled fast in certain circles of a young man who specialize in particular cases. Some, like his client last week, were mundane men and women who were too in their own heads or too fat or too thin or with a kink a little too far out there for their normal bed partners. Others, like his client next week, popped claws or fangs or literally needed sexual energy to survive the week. 

He got the routine requests for a hole to fuck, and sometimes, if he was feeling an itch, he answered them. Most of the time, he ignored them though. There were rules, afterall, rules he’d established through the last six years that had lead him to his current lifestyle. 

He didn’t see clients more than once unless there was some outstanding arrangement. He didn’t bring clients to his apartment. He didn’t go to theirs. The hotel room was bought and paid for by himself, always a different room in a different hotel across the greater New York City area. Fees were to be in his account before he let anyone through the door. Silver, vervain, wolfsbane, iron, all were carefully packed away in easy to reach areas of the hotel where he could get ahold of them if needed. 

He had only two recurring clients, one a succubus who didn’t want to feed on people who didn’t know what she was and the other a merman who made his home in a lake just north of the city. Neither could get what they needed elsewhere without causing a scene, and to be honest, Stiles didn’t mind them. They were...friends of a sort. They were a reminder that he wasn’t insane. 

His key turned in the lock, and he took the time to shower before settling down in front of the computer. This month, he’d had cases that softened the core of him, leaving him reducing his prices to meet the needs of a client he actually found himself wanting to help. The mundane man’s story had left him staring at his own dick, wondering what it would be like to be married with three children and to have never had an orgasm in his life. The succubus had been the week before, and often times, he enjoyed himself enough with her that he didn’t charge her. Afterall, monthly appointments and fees were expensive and exhaustive, even for the supernatural.

He opened up his email inbox, glared at the three digit number waiting for him, and started through the slosh pile.


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An engagement goes wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, you guys are awesome, and I received quite a lot of positive feedback on this one, so I'm going to soldier forward with posting.

As carefully as he planned his liaisons, his clients, things invariably went sideways. Which was what he was at the moment...sideways. He’d remembered being on the bed, stretched out in front of a female vampire he’d been able to research back as far as her emigration to the United States in the early 1800s. 

They’d talked for longer than normal when she’d come through the hotel room door, soft smiling and very aware of his weapons hidden in the room. Garlic, she told him with a smile, did little more against her kind than make the sex smell, and he’d laughed as he’d tossed it into a ziplock bag. 

She’d a particular kink, but not one uncommon to the vampire world. Blood letting wasn’t even uncommon in the mundane deviants, but it was particularly damning for a vampire to want to be the recipient. She’d told him of blood ties and bonds and how vampires offered their necks to one another in her emails, but she’d also told him about thrall and subservience and he’d melted like butter. 

Things started like they always started, some innuendo and someone leaning into the other first, and Stiles found himself on his back on the mattress, naked and hard and watching the beautiful creature above him strip out of her high collared turtle neck. Really, that should have been his first warning. The thick, banding scar around her neck, the lash marks on her back and breasts and belly. 

He’d had half a moment between staring at her scarred, naked body and the next when he was pressed to the bed with supernatural strength to wonder exactly how fucked he’d gotten in the last hour. 

Edme Bel was a creature that had been breathtakingly beautiful before she’d been turned, but even in that moment, scarred and naked and terrifying braced on the floor across from him, she was still one of the most stunning women he’d ever seen. Stunning and deadly. 

She’d managed to tie his hands to the bedframe, reappropriating a strip of the bedding into a binding. Her lips had skitter started down from his temple to his throat, pressing a sucking kiss there before her teeth grazed him and he panicked. He thrashed as desperately as he could, twisting and throwing his hips. 

She’d wanted simplicity, was more comfortable with it, and so he’d gotten a bed at a little motel in the middle of nowhere. A single, which was the only reason he’d managed to throw her and the mattress and the bedframe onto its side. Suspended there by ankles and wrists, he stared at the glowing red eyes across from him. 

“That was unkind,” she said, slinking on her knees across the carpet toward him. 

She reached out, drawing a clipped fingernail down the side of his face to where his pulse was pounding beneath his skin. She pressed, fingers skittering slick, and when she drew them back into his field of view, they were red with his blood. They disappeared into her mouth, a low, lusty groan rumbling from her chest and around her fingers. 

“I’m not your blood bank,” he said, breath thin from the awkward way he was hanging. 

“Everyone is my blood bank,” she purred, settling in front of him on the carpet. “Such a pretty little boy, so very young. I was younger than you when they took me from my home for being a pretty little thing.” 

Panic lanced through him. It didn’t take his higher intellect or the street-wise ways he’d developed in the last few years to realize where she was going with the distant stare. As much as he didn’t want to die there, strapped to a twin bed in nothing but the skin he was born in, bled dry and probably sobbing, he also didn’t want the other option lurking in her eyes. 

“He took me because I was young and wide-eyed and exotic, and when he was through with me, he left me in a cell awaiting the guillotine. Do you know what I did, pretty one?” she asked, drawing her eyes from that distant time and staring at him. He held his breath, fingers scrabbling at the knots around his wrists. There was a bottle of vervain spray in a perfume bottle hidden in the bedside table a few scant feet away. If he could free his arms, he might be able to flop around enough to reach it, but to do that, she’d have to be distracted. 

“Turned you?” he asked, anything to keep her talking. 

She tossed her head back, laughter in every line of her, as she stretched out on the carpet, running a hand up from her navel to between her breasts to the wicked, twisted scarring at the base of her throat. 

“He gave me the option of hanging myself in my little cell or awaiting the falling blade. You can see which I chose. It was a pity someone else’s choice meant more than my own.” 

“I’m sorry that decision was taken from you,” he said and felt the slip of sweat free his right hand. He caught the bars of the headboard and held on, praying she didn’t notice. There must have been gods to go along with devils in the world, because she smiled prettily at him, lay back on her back in the carpet, and stared at the ceiling. 

“I’m going to give you the same option, pretty one,” she said. “Do you know how many people I’ve given that option since it was taken from me? How many lives I’ve changed?” 

He didn’t, and he didn’t want to know. She didn’t care. 

“The first man died,” she said simply, “but since then, there have been so many men, so many beautiful men that will forever be beautiful until silver or sun claim them.” 

“How many?” he asked, testing how far he could leverage himself, and on an overeager thrash, he found his momentum carrying him forward. Too far, too far!

She shrieked as the bedframe tipped again, forward and half on top of her. That was all that kept him from suffocating beneath its weight as he scrabbled for the drawer and the perfume bottle inside. Seconds tripped by, too long and too short as he used his teeth to uncap the bottle and spray it into the air — a fine, dancing shimmer of sweet smelling promise invaded the air, her lungs, his own, but it would only hurt one of them. 

He was thrown backward, the bed and mattress and all, slamming against the far wall, and when he looked up for her, for the threat, she was gone. The room was empty of the threat of her, of any evidence she’d ever been there save the scratches on the floor where the bed had fallen and the slow, warm slide of his own blood on his neck, soaking into the bedding beneath him. 

“Jesus,” he muttered, sagging for a moment. He allowed himself a few long breaths, carefully willing the panic in him down. Red eyes danced in his memory from before and from now. Red eyes were pervasive in the supernatural community, an indication of power recognized across the species. 

Red eyes in the dark. Red eyes mocking him from across a nursing home. He swallowed and forced himself from the swelling panic. He had another hand to free and a hotel manager to pay off before calling Chris Argent. Days after he’d settled in New York City, Chris had tracked him down, told him he wasn’t crazy and had assured him the wolf problem in Beacon Hills was over. Since, he’d seen the man once or twice, giving him tips on supernatural creatures that were less than copacetic to his rules. 

After he’d escaped from the ties on the bed and had dressed himself and put the room to rights, he gathered what was left of his pride, the shattered little bits of it scraping the edge of his backbone.

#

“You can’t be going running again,” Cora whined, shielding her eyes from the overhead light and currying her face into the couch cushion. 

“It’s almost seven in the morning,” Derek said, and suddenly, the blanket she’d burrowed into was stolen. “You should be running, burn off some of your energy before the full moon.” 

She growled as she sat up, hair sticking up in all directions, morning breath offending her delicate nose. The city was a far too much of everything she never wanted in her life. Smog and smoke and pollution — both mechanical and human. It was a far cry from the wide, open countryside of Beacon Hills or the wilds of South America, where she could go days without seeing anyone if she wanted. There were criminals and deviants and other packs that were far too large for their tiny group to challenge, but it was home, it was family. 

It was Derek Hale, who she’d thought dead years ago. Soon, it might even be the rest of his pack, his teenage wolves he’d bitten in a rush of fear after waking up with the family’s alpha power in his veins. For now though, it was Derek, who spent every morning running for hours in Central Park because he had no other outlet for all the emotion he wouldn’t let the pack know he was feeling. 

Fear. 

Anger. 

Desperation. 

Need. 

For the pack of baby wolves, it was easy to go about their days thinking their alpha was just cold, that the world had burned down to the core of him and when it left, it took all of his humanity with it. Cora wasn’t a bitten wolf. She wasn’t new to the world of sights, sounds and smells, to chemosignals and the smells of pain.

“You coming?” Derek asked from the doorway, and she shook her head. She’d wear off her energies in other ways closer to the moon. As a Beta, there was less of it pent up in her soul, in her muscles and sinews and heart. Her brother though, her brother was spiraling around something dangerous with the way he’d refused to commit to the wolf inside of him. 

Being a werewolf wasn’t being a human that occasionally wore wolf skin. It was instinct and animalism and something base and natural that existed outside of humanity. She was a human, and she was a wolf. Neither side could flourish while the other was ignored, and Derek had been ignoring his wolf’s needs for fear of his pack’s reactions for far too long. 

Eventually, the pack would need things he couldn’t give them as a human. They’d need someone else to lead them, someone to balance everything out. She didn’t know if the Hale pack ever had a word for what her father was to her mother, but in South America, the counterpart to the Alpha was important, special. A pack needed it as much as the Alpha. Derek would need a dragga, a female wolf to stand beside him, and the pack would need that balance if it were to settle, to grow. 

Cora sighed, stretched, and cracked her spine with a bone weary satisfaction that sent her slumping back to the couch. 

She’d worry about it later, at a more reasonable hour. For now, she had feelers out in the New York community, people who might be willing to help their Alpha burn off some energy.

#

Derek ran for his health. He ran to help the wolf burn off some of the bottomless well of energy, some of the frustration and the annoyance of it cloying against his skin. 

He wasn’t an idiot, no matter what people thought, his sister among them. There was no hiding the fact their pack needed expanding, but a sound pack needed sound leadership, and while Derek wasn’t the worst Alpha to walk the earth, he was far from the best. They were young and growing, testing their boundaries, and in that testing, they’d encountered other packs, seen the dichotomy of leadership that stood at the forefront of each stable pack. 

Derek was a hell of a werewolf when he wanted to be, but he wasn’t a wolf, not really. The wolf wanted things the man didn’t, things like a stable pack and growth and pups underfoot. The man had been burned too many times to even consider walking down that path, not again, not when every time he’d tried it had ended so spectacularly. 

Paige ended up suffering and dead at his own hands. 

Kate had burned his house down and his family with it. 

Jennifer tried to ritually sacrifice nearly a quarter of a small town. 

So Derek? Derek’s a-oh-fucking-kay living his life as a solo act, which would be abso-freaking-lutely fine if he didn’t have a pack pairing up and looking at him with big, expectant eyes, asking about that cute barista or the girl at the library or an omega drifting through town. He’d be fine if Cora wasn’t watching him with knowing eyes every time he let one of the pack pull him into a hug and didn’t pull away. 

He was man enough to admit that maybe the pack needed more leadership, but they could get that from a second just as well as a mated alpha-pair. And Derek? Derek could tell the wolf to go fuck itself because he couldn’t even look at a woman’s lips while she spoke without that shuttering feeling of wrong and no and please. 

Derek might have ran for more than his health. Derek might have ran because the world didn’t give him many other options.


	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stiles takes on a new client, and Cora discovers something important.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so happy you all continue to enjoy this.

The realization hit Cora like a semi-truck three days later while they were running Derek’s normal circuit in the spit of green they called Central Park. They’d been running since the sun blinked up over the towering buildings that walled the park, reminding her with every glance toward the skyline that she wasn’t free, wasn’t running, not really. She’d wanted to ignore Derek’s pointed looks and the lure of the moon coming full that night, but the itch in the core of her was stronger than it ought to be. 

So, she’d gone with him for the run, the wolf beneath her skin cloying to really sprint, eat up earth and leave the humans, slow, weak, prey, behind. It’s only as they’re slowing to avoid a group of young women, soccer mom’s probably, that Cora starts to suspect. When that fails and a particularly youthful, bouncy redhead with a pleasant enough smile and interesting green eyes chat’s Derek up and runs a hand down his shoulder to the elbow that she knows. 

Derek’s shiver was imperceptible to human eyes, even the woman didn’t notice it, but Cora did, right along with the stench of disgust and fear and no, no, no! pouring off her brother. She’d stumbled half a step, right back into a tree, hands scrabbling at the bark, eyes wide and watching, horrified, as Derek turned toward her. 

To his credit, he didn’t leave her there, the world out from beneath her feet. Instead, he sat on the ground beside her, drew his knees up to his chest, and breathed quietly while she regained her balance. 

“What happened?” she asked quietly, the words barely audible over the rustle of wind through the underbrush. 

“Paige,” he admitted quietly, like it was explanation enough. Cora’s mind raced through Paige and what had happened to her, but that wouldn’t have been enough, not to— “Kate.” 

“Argent?” Cora asked, the word spat out and twisted. Cora had been young when the Hale house had burned to the ground, but she’d learned that the Argent heiress was responsible, but Kate had been well into her twenties, and Derek—

Derek had been fifteen. 

Her stomach turned and roiled and threatened its way up to the base of her throat. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t open her mouth for fear of it continuing its vertical march. The silence stretched on for minutes before Derek rose from the undergrowth and ran. It took her far too long to follow, the wolf crying, roaring, demanding she rip the throat from the woman that had broken her brother, her alpha, her packmate. 

Kate Argent was dead though, dead and gone from the world, where the wolf couldn’t reach. 

She decided then, in that moment, to put her significant energies toward fixing what the woman had broke instead of tearing him apart more. Cora caught up with him quickly, light and agile and strong from years of running with wolves, and she made sure her scent was open and accepting and honest as she ran beside him. 

#

Stiles sat down at a small wrought iron table in the back of a coffee shop patio, carefully sipping his drink — decaf, because gods did he not need anymore jitters — and waited. He’d considered the client request for a full month, putting off the young woman asking after his services in hopes that she’d grow disgusted with a heavy schedule, a whore overused and thus not worth her time or money, but when she’d persisted, he had wondered enough that he’d agreed to meet her to discuss the client. 

It was a coffee shop he was comfortable with, had interviewed clients in before. The owner knew his name, knew the names of the people he met with, and was instructed to provide that information to the police should Stiles not check in the next day. A precaution, but one only proven more necessary by the fiasco the other night. 

There were still scars on the side of his neck and throat to remind him of how close he’d come to no longer being what he was — mortal, human, breakable. How many times in his life would he stare down that possibility, the edge of humanity and nearly be forced across it? He was staring into his coffee cup, into two sets of blazing red eyes when a woman cleared her throat. 

His head snapped up. Not a woman grown, not quite yet, still small and spritely, but not a teenager either, a young woman slow to transition into adulthood. She was strikingly beautiful with her short nose and dark eyes, sharp, angular cheekbones and hair cut along those lines. Never had anyone looked so much like a wolf. 

“Cora?” he asked, gesturing toward the seat across from him where another cup still steamed.

She took the offered chair, sharp eyes never leaving him as she dumped in two creams and a fistful of sugar packets. He almost smiled at the face she made as she sipped at it. 

“You’re the…” she stumbled over what to call him, and he laughed outright. 

He’d been concerned, taking this meeting. He’d only interacted with werewolves minimally, and never in the professional sense. He’d always avoided them, and he wasn’t too proud to admit that every time he thought of one of them red eyes danced in his vision. 

“Whore?” he asked, careful to keep the amusement just in his smile and not in his eyes. “Prostitute?” 

“I wouldn’t call you—”

“A name is a name, wolf,” he said, shrugging. “I’m all those things, and you’re not going to offend me by using them.” 

“You’re a human,” she cut in, sharp and annoyed. “I can exercise basic human decency, especially when I want something.” She froze at that, agile mind running over what she’d just said, what she’d admitted to, what she’d implied. 

“And you can be the exact opposite when you don’t,” he said for her, knowing the smile on his lips had turned feral. 

“So can I, and now that you’ve learned that, we can get down to business.” 

She considered him a moment as he sipped at his coffee, and he wondered if she’d get up and leave, if he’d insulted her too deeply, threatened too openly. After draining the last of her own cup, she smiled, propped her chin up on the table with an elbow, and spilled what she knew of the tale of a boy named Derek Hale, a boy the world had turned into a man that flinched at the touch of anyone but his pack. 

“I’m not a therapist,” he said, when she’d finished her story. “You get that, right? I don’t have a psychology degree...I’m not—”

“You are aware of the supernatural world. You’re...well, I’ve spoken with a few of your clients, ones that have wives and children and husbands because of time spent in your bed. I have no doubt that Derek needs someone to talk to, someone to teach him that things aren’t as terrible as they have been in the past, but you’re all we have. The supernatural community doesn’t have the luxury of a yellow pages.” 

“He’s aware you’re here?” he asked, and when she avoided his eyes, he blew out a frustrated noise. 

“I can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. Email me—”

“He wants to be helped. I swear, he just doesn’t...he’s too proud to admit something’s wrong.” She stood as he did, backpedaling to keep in front of him. “Please! He’s my brother, and I can’t stand that he doesn’t have anyone. Please!” 

He paused, the fear and pain on her face clear, morphing her from that wolf, that sharp, feral thing hiding beneath human skin to a girl, just a girl terrified for her brother. He swore softly, ran a hand through his hair, and was damned. 

#

Derek wasn’t excited about the prospect of finding a mate for his pack, to carry on the Hale name or balance out the power struggle that inherently came with a small pack growing. 

With his pack pairing off, growing older, more serious about their infatuations, there would be pups soon, packs of cubs underfoot keeping him on his toes, keeping them anchored and grounded and happy. Except, a good alpha would help focus their energy, teach them to grow and love and learn the ways of the pack and of the humans they lived amongst. Derek wasn’t sure he could do that alone, which was why he was sitting in a coffee shop across from a brunette woman who had invited him for coffee after his morning run. 

She was...nice, actually, kind and simple. She’d been married and divorced with no kids to call her own. She wanted them, which was good for Derek in the grand scheme of things, but she was so bland he feared her reaction if they actually hit it off. He didn’t tell her anything about his past, not about his shattered family or anything that might scare her away. 

Instead, he spoke of his ‘friend group’, his sister, the classes he’d taken and the job interview he had coming up next week. She smiled and encouraged and when he rose to walk her to the cafe door, her car beyond, he couldn’t have recalled one singular outstanding thing about her. 

He stood on the sidewalk, waving as the car pulled away, his lips rough as he pressed them together. He’d initiated the kiss, just a press of lips against her cheek, and still it made him remember. Paige, innocent and smiling as he’d trailed kisses from her temple down to her chin. Kate, who liked to do the same to him as a way to get to his throat, he knew now, not out of affection. 

“Man, do I know that look,” someone said to his right, and he startled. 

The man there was tall and lanky, amber eyed and smiling as if in commiseration. 

“What look?” he asked, more curious than annoyed in the moment he realized he’d seen the man before, running in the Ramble, lost to another time, another place, and Derek realized, maybe he did.

“The look that says, ‘You’d be so good for me, but I don’t want you’,” the man said, and Derek startled. He took a stuttered step backward, toward the street, and the man held up his hands. “Gods know I wear it often enough.” 

It was that statement, the self-depreciating commiseration that had Derek stopping his retreat, really looking at the man standing a few feet away from him. He was handsome, confident at first glance, but his shoulders were forced lax, hands fisted in his pockets, like he wasn’t sure of himself, was ready to fight if the situation demanded. 

“That obvious?” Derek asked, taking a step forward and a deep breath, processing the forced calm, the anxiety bubbling just beneath it, and then what lay below that. Depression, loneliness, self-depreciation and skin on skin on skin, like he’d made such a parade of poor life decisions for lovers that not one of them had sunk into more than his skin, just the superficial, there and gone to disappear in a few days or hours. There was a moment where Derek wondered if he was trying to make him another transient imprint of scent on skin before he shook the thought away. There was no arousal to his scent, no want or desire, and Derek welcomed the interaction. 

The man’s head dropped in a nod, and when he looked back up, he was smiling. “Buy you a drink? Bitch about it?” 

Derek found himself echoing the man’s nod a moment after.


	4. Chapter Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stiles takes a job he shouldn't, and Derek might be more open minded than he'd thought.

Stiles was the biggest piece of shit to ever walk on two legs. It was a certifiable fact as he checked his bank account balance and found the agreed upon payment waiting there. He’d been spending time with Derek for the last two weeks, first just that drink at the corner bar, then running together in the Ramble when they both had been there at the same time. Last week they’d swapped phone numbers, and Derek had told him to call if he wanted to run again.

Stiles had called that next day, Derek the one after. They’d spent every morning running since. Most days, Stiles was gassed out and pouring sweat when he clapped Derek on the shoulder and retreated while Derek kept going. Today though, Derek had laughed, urged him onward another half a mile, and then, when Stiles had collapsed in a heap on the side of the pathway, panting and feeling like a piece of shit, he’d sat down beside him, waited for the human to regain his breath, and had asked him if he wanted lunch. 

Which was why Stiles was the biggest piece of shit to ever draw breath. He was stinking up a high backed, comfy as sin chair in his loft apartment while Derek threw together a lunch the likes of which Stiles had never seen. Sandwiches and chips, potato salad and macaroni, dish after dish put together and placed on the overlong table in the middle of the loft. He was tempted to ask about the food before a knock on the door and the rolling metal hinging screamed annoyance as it was pushed aside. 

Cora. 

Stiles’s eyes widened fractionally, and he shifted for a moment as she walked toward him, hand held out in greeting. Panic lanced through him, and he stood, muttering something about forgetting a prior engagement. He stuttered his apologies, not stopping when he slipped past a beautiful blonde in the doorway. 

He paced his apartment an hour later, pissed as hell at himself and twice as angry at Cora, at the world, because Derek Hale? Derek Hale was an actual decent god-damned human being on top of being a werewolf. And Stiles? Stiles had sat in that loft, laughing and joking and completely forgetting what he was supposed to be doing, what he was being paid to do. Jesus, who made friends with the person they were being paid to help get over their sex hang ups? 

Showered and dressed a few hours later, he walked out the door to a last minute client he’d previous had no plans to take, well aware it would break all of his rules, many of his automatic dismissals, and probably at least a little of his skin. 

#

Maroon bruising danced down the center of his chest, mottling and darkening in the poor light of the hotel room as the man in front of him sucked bright, blood filled mouth prints to the surface of his skin. Each one had started slow, easy, pleasurable even, fading into a sharp, stinging pain that made him draw sharp little breaths before he pulled away. 

“What made you change your mind?” he asked, hands bracing against Stiles’s naked hips. The words were breathed into the last little welt before he moved down, dipping his tongue into his navel and then nipping at the skin beneath it. A breath, two, and the blonde headed man was sucking at the junction of hip and thigh. 

“You need to hurt someone,” Stiles panted, voice sharpening on the sharp sting of pain and the low, warm pulls of tongue and teeth and mouth. 

“And you need to be hurt?” he asked, pulling away. His lips were red, swollen from his exploration of Stiles’s throat and shoulders and chest, but there was blood on them now, blood from where his teeth had bitten to sharply. It was just a little knick in his skin, a centimeter long and only sluggishly oozing, but it was a promise, a start to something. 

“Yes,” he breathed, and just like that, he was damned. Wicked white teeth smiled up at him, sharply contrasted by the bloody lips. 

“I don’t intend to stop when you tell me to,” the man said. A tongue traced up the vee of his abdomen, the shallow dip between jumping abdominal muscles and pectorals to the base of his throat. Sweat pooled there, and the man lapped at it for a moment before huffing a breath. “But you knew that already.” 

“I knew,” Stiles confirmed. 

Most men that Stiles had been with that edged into the world of pain were desperate things, needing that pain on their lover’s faces to fulfil some need for them. This one, this one Stiles had turned down time and time again since establishing his rules, enjoyed causing pain as a punishment, as a means to level the playing field. He was slow with it, pleasure and pain mixing until Stiles didn’t know what he was waiting for, which he was hoping for with each touch of skin. 

Wasn’t sure until he was pressed face down on a mattress, arms tied behind his back at the elbows, naked and aching and waiting. Wasn’t sure until the first sharp, cloying sting of pain, the echoing crack of a lash lost in his own muted scream. White hot fire licked along his left arm, snaked down to the elbow and across his low back. A laving, sucking kiss danced down the mark, disappearing before agony exploded along his right hip, down the cheek of his ass and the length of his thigh. 

The burning faded, replaced by cool slicked fingers probing into him once quickly, jabbing and retreating once before the sharp stab of his cock pushing past muscle and skin until his hips were pressed flush against Stiles’s own. Blood ran down his thigh, whether from the lash or insufficient preparation, he didn’t know, didn’t care. 

Hips snapped, lost in a jagged rhythm for only the span of four or five shuttering, punched out breaths before he was left, cold and shaking and empty, sharp pain lancing through him as his body clenched on nothing. 

“Please,” he said, the word half a whisper into the blanket, but he didn’t know what he was asking for, something more or something less. The stinging bite of agony came again, licking up the side of his neck, and he could see the blood as it pooled beneath him, staining the sheets. Another on his back, an errant blow down a calf, and he was blacking out as he was thrust into again. 

#

Stiles groaned from the comfort on his sofa as the doorbell sounded again. There was no real reason to get up, to answer it, and at least a dozen to stay where he was, where he’d been for two days. Heavy-handed knocking came shortly after, and he groaned as he rolled to his feet. 

His back was the worst of it, scabbed and sutured intersecting lashes of a whip. He’d woken up alone on the bed, a mess of blood and agony, and had only made it to his feet and phone with enough energy to call a witch doctor he’d used in the past to make scars disappear, wounds heal faster than they should. 

He was still limping, from the wounds to his legs or the lancinating pain lingering deep inside him, he didn’t know, but he’d managed to get to the door, bracing against the wall and heaving a sigh before a voice came through the door. 

“Open the damned door, you smell like blood and agony, and Derek’s almost worried enough after you left to come find you.”

Stiles froze, mind running through a thousand voices and people and settling on the quick-tempered wolf in an instant. “Cora?” he asked, opening the door a crack to stare at her in the too bright hallway. She couldn’t have seen him not even with her wolf eyes. His apartment lights were off, the only source the distant windows, and even that was failing as a storm rolled into Manhattan off the coast. 

“What did you do?” she asked, pushing the door open and stepping inside. Her eyes adjusted fast, but they should have, given what she was, and she was hissing, eyes darkening and running up and down him. “Who did this?”

He bit his tongue, tasting copper on the tip before shaking his head. He’d made the call, had gone with complete understanding of what was going to happen, what he’d wake up like. There would be a few days of pain, a week at the most, and he’d make sure the scar faded into nothingness, even if he had to call on the witch doctor again. 

“I’ve been well compensated,” he said instead of answering, and limped back toward his sofa. “I do have other clients than your brother—”

“My brother, who you ran away from in his loft, who had finally, fucking finally made a friend he could stand being in the same room as?” she asked, annoyance bleeding through her worry. “My brother who was so fucking worried about you not answering your phone that he was about to go out sniffing every street corner in Manhattan to try to find you? What do you think would have happened then? What do you think he’d have said if he found out?” 

“That his sister hired a whore to sleep with him, lay some magic dicking on him and cure him?” Stiles spat, annoyed and angry right back. 

“Yes!” Cora shouted, stalking around his apartment. “If he finds out the first person he’s let into his life was planted there, is there for something other than what they say they are, he won’t trust anyone again. Jesus didn’t you—”

“No!” Stiles shouted, forcing himself to stand again. “Didn’t you think about that? Didn’t you know this was going to be a problem? Gods, it would be better if he fucking knew what I was and—”

“It would be,” Cora said, voice distant and lost. “It absolutely would be.” She looked at him once, smiled wickedly, and disappeared from his apartment. Stiles groaned, eased himself back into the cushions, and fished his phone out of the crack between them. Derek had texted him three times, all vague and not too interested, not to pushy. 

SO, SHOULD I BE TERRIFIED THAT YOUR SISTER JUST HAPPENS TO KNOW WHERE I LIVE?

The text was off his fingers and gone in an instant. He dropped the phone, looking to ease his back against the cushion, only halfway making it before the phone buzzed in his lap. 

SHE’S GOOD AT FINDING PEOPLE. YOU ALRIGHT?

He considered that a moment, rolled his eyes and responded with the affirmative, that he had a job that he’d forgotten about and that he’d see Derek in the Ramble in a week or so. He’d be more careful, he told himself, more careful with his attentions, more focused on helping Derek and less about spending time in his presence. It was what was best for the both of them. 

Sleep chased pain and pain chased sleep for a pair of hours before his phone chimed again. 

LIAR

He frowned at the screen for a confused, sleepy moment before his door jolted once, twice, three times with a command to be answered before a lingering silence. He managed to get to the door before the knocking came again, and when he cracked it, Derek glared back at him, one eyebrow raised toward his hairline as if to ask what the hell he thought he was doing. 

“Open the door. We have some things to talk about.” 

“Whatever Cora—”

“My sister thinks you’re embarrassed by your job and that you’re not taking care of yourself. Open the door. Tell me I’m wrong, and I’ll go home and see you in a week to run.” 

Stiles blew out a breath, left the door cracked, and retreated to the kitchenette to pour himself a mug of coffee. He lifted an empty cup toward Derek, who nodded as he sat at the island. Two mugs on the countertop later, Stiles was easing himself into the stool, careful of how he pressed his weight. 

“The first day I met you in the Ramble, you were somewhere else, running from something that wasn’t there,” Derek said, startling Stiles into looking at him. “What were you running from?” 

“Does it matter?” Stiles asked, taking a drink to distance himself from the words. 

“It got you here,” Derek said, gesturing toward Stiles. He could have meant sitting at a kitchen table, bruised and bleeding, but Stiles knew better, knew Derek better after only a couple weeks of friendship. He meant alone, depressed, a part of him hating himself every time he woke up in the morning. He meant irrevocably changed from the boy he’d been when he’d ran through those woods. 

“And what a wonderful view here has,” Stiles quipped, looking anywhere but at Derek. 

“Cora called you a...Supernatural sex councillor,” Derek said, and when Stiles looked to him, it was Derek’s turn to look anywhere else. “Might have been easier to explain why I didn’t get tired running if I’d have known you were in the know.” 

“But I was having such a good time secretly hating you for your wolfy stamina,” Stiles said, and just like that, they were alright. Not good, not in the way they could be if Stiles really was oblivious, if Cora hadn’t told him part of the truth and not the rest of it. “I’m not a councillor. I’m...observant, I guess? And aware of the supernatural communities needs. Most of my clients are from that walk of life, but some are just human.” 

“But you help people with...Cora said you helped people with hang ups.” 

“I do, sometimes. What Cora probably didn’t tell you because she seems to have a problem with it is that I’m a prostitute.” Stiles sat back on the stool, hiding the pain that lanced down his back. He met Derek’s eyes, challenging, watching, waiting for the slow spreading disgust that never came. 

“This...can’t happen often or I’d have known,” Derek said, gesturing toward Stiles, the thin, well sutured line of broken skin on the side of his neck. The skin was already knitting together well, and the poultices he’d been given would make the would disappear entirely. “It doesn’t...right?” 

“I take the clients I want to take,” Stiles said, shaking his head. “Normally, I don’t take clients I know have specific kinks, not unless I want what they need.” 

“You wanted this.” 

“Enough to take three grand for it,” Stiles said. Derek nodded, averting his eyes again, a blush rising on his cheeks, and Stiles almost laughed. He hadn’t known wolves could blush. 

“Three grand is a good night’s wages.” Stiles saw the vague, calculations running through the wolf’s eyes. 

“I don’t make three grand a night, Derek. Jesus, there isn’t some conga-line running down the hallway for my ass.” Stiles glared over at the wolf, viscously taking a long sip of his coffee as Derek stared at him, unblinking for a long moment before a slow snickering smile spread across his face. 

“That’s...good,” Derek finally managed, after the laughter had stopped. “You’ll be ready to run in a week?”

“Of course,” Stiles said, standing as Derek abandoned his coffee and headed toward the door. 

“And you’ll call me if something...bad happens again. You shouldn’t sit in your own pain, not if you don’t have to.” Stiles rolled his eyes toward his ceiling and huffed an affirmative. 

“You and your armies are welcome here whenever you want to sit in my pain,” Stiles quipped, closing the door behind the wolf. 

It was hours later, as he rolled over in bed, dreams lost to sprinting through the woods, red eyes chasing him with each step, that he woke up sweating and heaving out a shuttering breath. Those same red eyes danced behind his vision, and he realized that he hadn’t thought about them when he’d been with Derek, not since that day on the sidewalk.

Derek Hale, who knew what he was, who hadn’t looked at him disgusted, and who had alpha red eyes.


	5. Bad Communication

It wasn’t that Derek hadn’t considered it. He had, at least once or twice since Cora had told him what their new little human did for a living. At first, in that hour where he’d just stormed around his apartment and then wandered until he caught the right scent, he’d thought about it quite a bit, about the idiocy and the threat and the sheer confidence it had to take to be human and naked with a supernatural creature that could rip his throat out in an instant.  
Then the scent had mixed with pain, and he’d been more concerned than angry. 

Stiles looked worse than he smelled, which was a testament to his pain tolerance, but seeing him had snuffed that anger out completely. He’d been able to look at the man on the other side of the door and remember wide eyes, eyes that were elsewhere just like he was sometimes, and he’d been able to sit and drink coffee like any other day. 

Except...his mind had run wild when Stiles had mentioned his...payment, and he’d ended up thinking about the kind of things you had to do to get three grand in an evening and the kind of things you had to do to pay for a Manhattan two bedroom apartment in the part of the island he lived on. The number of things with the number of people, and then he’d had a little race of protectiveness he normally reserved for his pack.  
Which was why he was sitting awake in his bedroom, glaring at the industrial ceiling and considering doing something unendingly stupid. He’d been running with Stiles again for a week, talking himself into and out of asking every step of the way. Tonight, though, tonight there had been a slip, just a little one, and Cora had been pinned to the floor while they’d been roughhousing, eyes shining gold and it had taken the command of an alpha to bring control back to his betas. And Derek? Derek wasn’t an idiot. 

The pack felt the strain of being a small pack in a city of passersby, the fear that they were unguarded, that if there was trouble, they might not be able to defend themselves, but a bigger pack, a healthy, thriving pack, needed more than an alpha to keep them under control, in line, happy. 

So, Derek swallowed his pride, thumbed the message into his cell phone, and regretting every single moment along the way, turned it off, rolled over, and went to sleep. 

#

She was beautiful. 

Soft, flushed cheeks caught the light where sweat beaded and dripped down along a sweetheart jaw and thin, pale throat, bared in the sunlight that filtered through cheap, gauzy hotel windows.  
He didn’t normally do day-time meetings, but she was human, cute and unsure of herself and so very human that if he wanted, he could throw her off of him with little more than a buck of his hips.  
Hips that were patiently pinned to the bed, waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting. 

He stood hard and throbbing, resting against the crack of her ass as she wiggled against his pubic bone, the delicious promise of hot and tight and wet just a shift and rock away. He was patient though, so very patient, and he ran his fingers up her thighs, well muscled and flaring into beautiful hips, woman’s hips, his mother would have called them, that ducked into a trim waist. 

From the front, she was perfect. He’d seen gorgeous women, had been buried in them as his lips spat out slurs and insults and every dirty trick it could manage, but none of them perched on his hips, nervous and unsure and so very sweet in their shyness and fear. 

Because the back of her, the part of her she’d wanted to show someone, the part of her she was ashamed of, had been taken and ruined and made into her shame. So, he was patient, soothing her with the delicate tips of his fingers low against her belly, on her thighs and hips and teasing up her ribcage. 

“You are beautiful,” he said, arching his low back to roll beneath her, press himself more firmly into her so she could feel him, feel he wasn’t lying.

She blushed and nodded and ran her fingers from the base of his throat down his chest and abs to beneath her, where she found him pressing, asking, waiting patient, patient, patient. 

Her hand gripped him, shaking and colder than was comfortable, but he kept his face open, honest, reverent as she lined him up and sank down on him with one quick, confident slide. Tight heat squeezed down on him, and he groaned despite himself. There was pain on her face, in her eyes and in the quiet little punched out groan she made, but that’s what she’d wanted. She’d wanted his hands off of her, wanted him to let her control the pace, the prep, everything, and so he’d laid there and let her take what she wanted. 

Hips rolled forward, once, twice, but then the pain in her was shuttered off behind something darker. One quick, rocking thrust later, and she was slamming herself down, over and over. 

“Easy,” he chided as she pulled off too soon, pushing back down too quickly. There were shadows in her eyes, and she was somewhere else, somewhere a man held her down, tied her up and took his time beating her as he raped her. “No.” 

He gripped her hips, held her down on him, made her sit still. 

“What are you—”

“You’re not going to use my dick to recreate your rape,” he hissed, sitting up so she had to meet his eyes. “You came to me to make this go away, you came to me to make a new memory so you could go home and smile at some idiotic boy behind a cash register. I can do that, but not if you make it feel like it did before.” 

She glared at him, pulled away from his hands and his hips and stalked off the bed and across the room, pulling her dress over her head. It was the first she’d let him see her back, where the belt had managed to cut into her skin in five criss crossing lines. 

“At least you stopped hiding,” he said as she toe’d on one of the strappy heels she’d worn to make her feel taller, more in control. 

“I wasn’t hiding, you self righteous prick,” she hissed, turning back toward him. 

If she was beautiful before, he thought, laying on the bed, she was stunning in that moment. The Furies sang in her blood, and she was everything any wronged woman should ever be — strong and unbending and confident. 

“You aren’t afraid of my dick,” he said. “You aren’t afraid of me. I don’t think you’ve been afraid of anyone since that day, but your skin? Your back? You’re terrified of that, and you only let me see it when you walked away from me.” Maybe he wasn’t patient, maybe he was a self-righteous asshole, but this was, at least for her, important. 

He sat up, shifting to the end of the bed as he spoke. She was small. He could probably overpower her, calm her down until he could leave, but she was also angry and wronged and he had no desire to see what she’d learned since the last asshole had thought the same thing. Except, as he sat there, waiting for the wave of rage and wrath to fall on his head, none of it came. 

She just stood there, in her dress and one high heeled shoe, staring at him as if he’d said something terrifying. Which was why he had the courage to stand, cross the room, and run his fingers over where he knew one of the scars lay beneath the dress. 

“You’re one of the most beautiful creatures I’ve ever seen,” he said, “and you wouldn’t imagine the types of people had the pleasure of meeting.”

When she didn’t shift, didn’t move, he leaned forward, pressed his chest to her back, and hugged her, sweet and simple and so very much like his father used to hug his mother that it made something inside of him splinter and shake and shatter. “You’re only that beautiful, only that perfect, because of what you’ve suffered and how you’ve put yourself together into this breathtaking, strong woman who called me a prick and was willing to hurt herself to try to make herself stronger.” 

He wondered, as he held her and she sagged and sobbed, if when he stepped away from himself and looked at the broken pieces, if he’d be stronger for them. 

He was strong enough to pick her up and lay her out on the bed, to kiss and lick and ease when her tears finally stopped. To work her open slowly, painfully slowly, until she was keening a stranger’s name into the ceiling.  
“If he’s worth it,” he whispered, the words raising her from the riotous slide into that otherness she’d fallen into. “If he’s worth it, you’ll end up like this before he even thinks about fucking you. Loose and wet and begging.”  
He knew she only half heard him, knew she was still lost in that place where he’d sent her, resolving what was then with the now of it, the panting breaths and clasping fingers coming from her instead of someone else.  
“And if he’s really worth it,” he said, pressing a kiss to the lowest part of her belly, rising from the bed on his knees. “It won’t matter what your back looks like when he’s looking at you. What will matter is that you’ve got a spine of steel.”

He wondered what his was made of as he bent and bowed and changed himself for every new client he met. 

#

“I’m a fucking saint,” Stiles slurred, leaning back into the booth and glaring across at his best friend, his only friend, if he was honest with himself. Lydia Martin was god’s gift to mankind. In high school, she’d been completely oblivious to the fact he’d existed, until Scott had been killed. Until she’d very nearly bled to death on a high school football field. Until, through sheer force of will, creativity, and an impressive series of dead bodies, she figured out what she was, what the creature with red eyes was, and finally, where the only other person who seemed to understand something was going on had went. 

She’d found him the summer between her sophomore and junior year when he’d been sleeping in little more than a tent giving tentative blowjobs for food and working two part time jobs at a pair of Chinese restaurants that just needed someone to seat guests who spoke English and didn’t care if he was only sixteen. 

It had been her idea to expand his...activities into the supernatural, and while neither of them liked what he was doing, what he’d been, there was little either of them could do — or would accept — to change anything. Now, she was as comfortable with his job as he was. Just another service offered, and he had more control over his clients than most professions. 

“You’ve done better things for worse off people,” she said, sipping at her drink and making an affronted face. “Why do you bring me to these places? I said top shelf, Stiles, not Jimador.”

“It’s at least Corvo, and you know it, you elitist snob.”

“It isn’t,” she sniffed, but sipped again. “Why am I here, Stiles?” 

Which, to be fair, was an excellent question. They’d spent the better part of the last three years communicating through emails, text messages, and the rare voicemail, but he’d called. She’d answered, and there she sat. 

“How’s everything?” he asked instead, and listened when she told him about her research and the young TAs she was trying to wrangle into being more useful and less damaging. He asked because that was what Stiles Stilinski would have done. He’d have hung on her every word, mind racing through ways to make things easier for her, and as he sat there, sipping his own whiskey, wondering why the world was so full of people who had it far too easy, he realized something more terrifying than anything else he’d done. 

Stiles Stilinski, the wide-eyed boy who loved Lydia Martin like the sun, was nowhere in his bones. 

“He’s fine,” Lydia said, sensing the panic in him and missing the mark on the why. 

“Who?” he asked, spitting out the ice cubes from the bottom of his drink. 

“Noah.” She sipped at her own drink, face souring a moment. “A little cardiac scare last year, but from my understanding he’s made the appropriate life changes.” 

“A cardiac scare,” Stiles said, the echo of something in his mind. An elevated cholesterol level on a primary care physician’s report of findings. That lead to cardiac disease, right? “You didn’t say anything.” 

“It was over and taken care of before I knew.” A scrutinizing look. “Do you want to check in on him?”

“And say what?” Stiles asked, gesturing toward the bartender and his empty glass. “Hey, dad, I know your coronaries are for shit, but guess what, I’m the son you hoped wasn’t dead. Fun fact, still kicking, but letting sexually assaulted women get their confidence back on my dick?” 

“It’s usually men,” Lydia offered with a wicked smile. 

“Fuck you.” 

#

Stiles wasn’t drunk. He wasn’t. He’d had four drinks hours ago, just enough to soothe his own ego, and yet…

Surely he was drunk, because that was the only way he was reading what he was reading. The only the text message proudly staring back at him was anything close to reality.

“Fuck,” he muttered, force closing the application and bringing it up again. 

DO YOU HAVE FRIENDS AND FAMILY RATES? The text message read, open and frank and almost a joke. Almost because it had been followed up by another message eight hours later. 

THAT WAS COMPLETELY INAPPROPRIATE. I APOLOGISE. 

He sighed, scrubbed his hands over his face, and sniffed at his clothes. He changed, doused himself in axe body spray, and left his apartment with barely a backward glance because this? This was terrifying. This had the capacity to end in such a bad place that he’d skipped showering, skipped sleeping, skipped eating. 

All things Derek had apparently done since that initial message, if his face in the loft doorway was anything to go by. He looked rested but contrite, ashamed even, and the smell of bacon in the apartment was thick in the air. 

“Stiles,” he said, startled. 

“Stiles?” Cora’s voice called from behind, and he let his eyes be drawn to the large table where a sleep addled group was eating breakfast. “Come on in, there’s bacon!” 

He smiled despite himself, but shook his head. 

“I apologize, but your alpha and I need to have a talk.” He didn’t give Derek the chance to question, to contradict. He just glanced Derek up and down once before nodding and gripping the wolf’s elbow. For an alpha, he went with little fuss, just shouting behind himself that he’d be back in couple hours. It was optimistic, but it might be true.

Normally, Stiles would talk to a client in a cafe or a bookstore or somewhere equally quiet with a public presence. Instead, they caught the first train to the suburbs, road that for twenty minutes and when it became apparent not even that was good enough for the wolf fidgeting beside him, they caught another. 

Until the city and all its limbs disappeared around them, until it had been three hours and they were climbing off of a bus in the middle of nowhere. Pine hung in his nostrils as they walked, until finally, finally, Derek opened his mouth for something other than pleasantries and geolocation. 

“I shouldn’t have asked you that,” he finally said, breathing into the cool autumn air and looking anywhere but at Stiles, who had kept pace beside him as they walked. 

“Maybe not,” he agreed. “But if I was a lawyer, and you had a legal problem...would you think twice about asking?”

“I have a lawyer.” 

“You don’t have a me.”

“You don’t see a difference in legal recommendation and what you do?” Derek snapped, red eyes flashing quickly, flickering in and out of existence before settling again on green. 

Stiles tried not to be elsewhere, in another forest half a world away with another alpha. He tried. The leaves beneath his shoes crunched. Fallen branches snapped. Step...step...step. Step. Step, step, st-st-st—  
He was running, the darkness clawing at his skin, the laces of his shoes. He tripped, spinning out until he slammed into a tree, putting his back to it so that thing couldn’t sneak up on him, couldn’t—

#

“Stiles!” Derek shouted, hands fisted into his t-shirt, grounding him to the tree at his back. He hadn’t meant to snap at him, hadn’t meant to flash alpha-red eyes and snarl, but this was so very important, so very delicate in his own head and heart that he didn’t want to mix words, didn’t want someone making light of his pain or how wrong it had been of him to abuse a relationship like he had. 

The jolt or his name brought him back, because in the next moment, Stiles was blinking at him dizzily, lost of a moment before his face clouded and he looked away. 

“Let go,” the command came, without volume or strength, without alpha-command or protest. Derek complied quickly, ripping his hands from the boy’s shirt, wanting to ease whatever it had been that had started the young man down such a distant place in his mind. Whatever had—

Except it wasn’t whatever had done. It had been Derek, Derek and his alpha red eyes.

“It’s an alpha,” Derek said, recognition blossoming. That day in the Ramble, Stiles had been running from something, lost in another place, another time, and Derek had sent him right back there with a flash of eyes that had been more annoyance than anything. 

He backed away, put as much distance between them as he could while still keeping Stiles in front of him, close enough that he could grab the young man if he did something stupid, if he went back to that place in his own memory again. And Jesus, that haunted look, the way Stiles wouldn’t meet his eyes, the memory of the vague burnt smell of fear when Stiles had first met Derek on that sidewalk. 

“Shit,” Stiles muttered, and when Derek looked again, he was sagging against the tree, tugging at the strands of his hair with shaking fingers before he met Derek’s eyes again. “No, Derek. I’m not...it’s good, alright? We’re good. It’s been a long time. You don’t have to—”

“What happened?” Derek asked. He knew Stiles’s smells, knew how human he was, sensed it with his nose and his ears and his eyes, knew the human was just that. “You aren’t a wolf; you’re just human. You don’t just survive a bite if you don’t turn. That’s not how it works.”

“I know,” Stiles said, and his eyes dropped to the leaves again. That cloying burnt smell wafted through the autumn air, and Derek almost regretted speaking, regretted everything. “A friend...my brother didn’t…”

“Survive,” Derek said when it became clear Stiles couldn’t say the words, couldn’t breathe them into the world. That burnt smell shifted, grew thick and hot and spiced with something he couldn’t identify. 

“No one believed me,” Stiles said after a moment, and it took Derek longer than he’d like to admit to understand. “So I left, and I haven’t been back, not physically. Sometimes, though...sometimes I’m there instead.” 

Derek nodded, watching Stiles for a long moment, trying to determine if he was going to go right back down that road, back to an alpha and his dead best friend. The stink of fear and anger loosed his tongue. 

“Sometimes, I’m watching a house burn,” he admitted, and as if the words made it so, he felt the heat on his skin. He hadn’t even been there, hadn’t seen the flames, but he could feel that heat. Sometimes, he could hear the pop of floorboards and the keening scream of wolves. “I watch it burn with everything I love inside it.” 

He was lost for a moment, caught in the crackle and smoldering scent on the wind. 

“Derek Hale,” Stiles said softly, distantly, like he hadn’t really meant to say his name. Derek almost dismissed it, almost didn’t realize it carried more weight until Stiles repeated himself, voice more clear, firm, and those whiskey eyes turned toward him with damnation there. 

“Stiles?” Derek asked, but any further question was cut off in frantic, panicked laughter that bubbled and bubbled until the young man was on the ground, leaning back against the tree, tears running down his flushed cheeks, odd, pained chuckles fluttering in and out of existence. 

“Jesus, I should have remembered. Cora isn’t exactly a common name, and Hale...everyone knew whose family burned to death in those woods. The case file sat on his desk for weeks. I should have...and it would make sense.” Derek was waiting for the sense to come, but with each word tumbling past pink lips, he was more and more on edge. “You were alone, and wolves...wolves go feral when they’re left alone.”

“What are you talking about? How do you know…” It hit him like a brick. No one from New York would know about the fire that claimed his family. No one would make a connection between the names and a case file, not like that, not that quick. Kate had been at the high school, but the Argents...the Argents didn’t leave things to chance. 

It would make sense, perfect fucking sense, for them to have someone Cora’s age, someone some alpha had poisoned against wolves so thoroughly that they were young and dumb and willing to help put an entire family in the ground. His wolf growled, hackles rising, anger lacing with bone-deep fear and pain and—

“Did you have to kill him?” Stiles asked, genuine curiosity in his voice. It was that curiosity that gave the wolf pause, and the half-whispered question that came next, soft and airy, whispered to himself and not for supernatural ears. “Did you have to leave me alive?” 

Derek felt the red bleed from his eyes, the change slip off of him like water. He hadn’t even known he’d fallen into the half-shift, hadn’t felt his claws come through. 

“Jesus, why didn’t you just kill me?” The question fell on Derek’s shoulders, quick and in that same distant way. It was a splintered moment later and those eyes were sharpening on him, hardening and damning. “You going to kill me now, wolf? Kill me because your family died screaming?” 

The thing in him, the lupine, wild thing threw its head back and howled its pain, and the next thing Derek Hale knew, he was in wolf’s skin on his bed, curled up in a ball with his pack around him.


	6. Chapter Six

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been very careful not to name Derek's pack in NYC -- because right now, they're nameless. We get an introduction to some of our favorite characters this chapter, and I'm far more comfortable with it because - NO SMUT! Which was also why this took so long. The original piece was sort of scenes throughout the story. Posting it requires I make those snippets flow in one manner or another, so a bit of plot work was required here.

Stiles sat in the woods, staring up at the moon overhead. He’d stayed there, unmoving and uncaring as the man he’d come to know as Derek Hale slipped away in a breath, replaced with the dark fur and bared fangs of a wolf. It stared at him, snarled once, sniffed his shoe, and with a little, pained whine, disappeared between the trees. Stiles hadn’t moved since. 

He’d almost hoped…

“Black fur,” he muttered, remembering the satin shine of the sun off of the dark fur. “Black?” he asked himself, trying to remember. The moon overhead cast dancing shadows through the trees, and just like that he was sixteen again. 

_“Scott!” Stiles shouted, sliding into the detritus of the forest floor. His fingers shook as he reached out, grasping Scott’s hand. On the periphery of his vision, he could still see the man, the creature, that had leapt from the shadows. It was more man than beast, with thick, grey fur along its jaw. It didn’t matter though, because his vision washed red in the next moment._

_It was pale in the moonlight, far too pale for his summer-tanned skin, and the play of the failing light almost let Stiles ignore the darkened splatters and splashes against his fingers, his palm, the wrist that Stiles gripped too hard. Skin slipped against skin, and Stiles had to have whispered that name again and again in the following seconds, because it took Scott a moment, his big, brown eyes wide and vacant, sweeping across the sky overhead before findings their way to Stiles._

_“Scotty, man, it’s alright,” Stiles said, finding the rabbit heart in Scott’s wrist as it slowed and slowed. There was so much blood, slick and warm but cooling, and it took Stiles so long— too long— to see the wicked gash, wide and gaping and spilling intestine and something shiny brown out onto the ground._

_“Jesus,” Stiles muttered, and the world just tumbled forward, over and over and over as he pressed his hands into the wound, trying to push the insides back where they belonged._

_“S’ti?” Scott muttered, the world half a breath over the rush in Stiles’s ears, in the panic in his blood._

_Scott’s eyes were clear when Stiles met them, but in the next moment, they slid shut, and no amount of shouting would open them again._

_That was how they found him, the next morning, with Scott tugged up to his chest, cold and stiff as Stiles shifted him back and forth, sobbing apologies that would never be heard, waiting for forgiveness that would never be given._

#

Allison Argent had been working under the tutelage of her aunt for the last five years. It had taken moving to a new town, where a boy had been killed the very night they’d arrived, and a feral alpha wolf rampaging through town, turning a pair of teenaged douchebags into dangers before her family had put him down. 

Peter Hale. Peter Hale, who had been caught up in a house fire her father wouldn’t talk about but smelled suspicious even to her sixteen year old nose. Peter Hale, who disemboweled Scott McCall, sent the Sheriff’s son nearly from his own mind and running across the country, and who had killed and maimed and turned all in the name of revenge on her family. 

On her aunt. Aunt Kate, who was as strong a woman as Allison had ever met. Aunt Kate, who taught her how to hunt, how to make the land around Beacon Hills safe. Aunt Kate, who had her running around like a moron, posting campaign signs for Sheriff. The town needed new blood, she claimed, someone in the know about the supernatural community, someone who wasn’t pushing fifty with a bad heart. 

Someone, Allison suspected, that would do Kate’s bidding and look the other way when bodies turned up cut in half in the woods. Which...she was more than willing to do, when and if the owners of said bodies broke The Code. More and more, Kate was pushing, testing the waters of her young apprentice’s tolerance for things that went bump in the night. Last week, the three young wolves Peter had turned in his rampage through the town had disappeared, gone so far off the radar that Allison had crept through Kate’s lesser known haunts looking for them. 

She’d found them. Strapped to electrified chain-link fencing. It had turned her stomach in a way not much had since her mother’s death, since that boy had been eviscerated in the woods. They’d leaned on each other on their way out of the tunnels, leaned on each other until they’d found their way right out of town, off to find an alpha in New York that the local banshee had heard about. 

Heard about was probably not accurate, but Allison wasn’t digging, and Lydia, bless her, wasn’t speaking out of school. They’d been friends since Allison had moved to town, but there were times when Lydia had eyed her and carefully pursed her lips. Message received, head turned, and things continued on well between them. 

“Morning glory,” Kate chirped, startling Allison out of her own mind. She’d been handing out flyers in the grocery parking lot before she’d taken a break, snagged a bottle of water, and took a late afternoon nap in her car. The fact that the woman had come into town during daylight hours, so clearly...well...alive...was startling. 

“Someone’s going to see you,” Allison hissed, blinking away her post-sleep confusion and the afternoon sunlight coming through the window. 

“That’s the plan,” Kate said, voice that purr Allison had tried to emulate when she was younger. It was a manipulation, just like so many other things about the older woman. The subterfuge was important when you were dealing with dangerous people, dangerous creatures, that threatened you and yours, but Kate never turned it off, never peeled back the facade. Allison was increasingly concerned the woman had no other face to show the world. 

“Why would you want some up and coming cop recognizing a dead woman’s face walking around town?” 

“Come on, now, kid,” Kate said, voice alight. “You can think bigger than that.” 

Kate Argent was dead to the world at large, killed by Peter Hale in his tirade through Beacon Hills. In reality, it had taken a quick bit of military field medic training, but she’d pulled through. She’d been benched for six months, but she’d lived. The town’s declaration of her death was probably the only reason she was still alive. The Hales had more than enough reason to want her dead. When Allison had figured it out, she’d almost done it herself. 

“I can’t see any reason it would be beneficial for local…” No reason for anyone local to want her alive, but...three Betas had limped their way out of town, out of Argent territory and across the entirety of the United States. They would go with their tongues, too. Go with the story of Kate Argent. 

“You’re trying to draw the last of the Hales here,” she said, the words off her tongue and stinging her ears. 

“Look at you, girlscout.” Kate said, smiling wide. “You going to help me?” 

Allison stared out the windshield, set her jaw, and swallowed against the bile rising in her throat. “Sure thing.” 

#

“Lydia!” Stiles hissed into his cell phone. “Why are there three baby wolves sitting in on my couch, asking for an audience with Derek Hale? Call me back. Now.” Overly aggressive fingers smashed at the little red phone display, swearing under his breath until the call ended. 

“We didn’t mean to—”

“You’re fine,” Stiles said, cutting off the blonde headed wolf, turning quickling, gesturing toward the loft around him. “Mi casa...I just wish Lydia would have given me a call before she sent you all this way. I don’t have the connections with Alpha Hale she thinks I do.” 

“We can’t go back to Beacon Hills,” the girl said, blond hair hanging limp around her shoulders, face strained and void of anything but a dull resignation. The young man beside her, large arm wrapped around her shoulders, tugged her into his side and fixed Stiles with a heavy look. 

“We won’t go back to Beacon Hills,” he corrected. “Lydia said there are a few packs here. If you can’t introduce—”

“I said I didn’t have the connections the thought I had, not that I couldn’t get you where you need to be,” Stiles said, running a hand through his hair. 

It had been three weeks since they’d stood in that forest in the north of New York, three weeks since they’d spoken, since Stiles had opened his stupid mouth and let fear come bubbling out. Fear. Pain. Regret. Guilt. Years of it, and Stiles had let it change grey fur to black in his mind, let Alpha red eyes alter his perceptions and had wasted a perfectly good friendship. 

He blew out a sigh along with the regret in his bones and sank down onto the coffee table in front of the betas. The two joined at the hip hadn’t separated since he’d opened his front door, and the other, the blonde, had been between Stiles and the pair since they’d walked through. Now, the young man perched on the edge of the sofa, ready to put himself in the way should Stiles move. 

“Look, I’m not a wolf,” Stiles offered, hands out. “Not magic, not anything. Just human, and I’m not particularly dangerous for one of those either.” There was little change in their posture. “I’m not throwing you out, not suggesting you go back to… to Beacon Hills. Tell me what happened, and I’ll see about getting hold of one of Derek’s betas for you.” 

“What do you need to know?” the blonde asked, sharp eyed, and for a moment, Stiles remembered a gangly teenager, sulking in the shadow in the park, bruises around his left eye and jaw. 

“I’d start with your names?” Stiles offered. “But...ah...I guess in the spirit of putting your at ease? My name is Stiles. I know Lydia because—”

“Because your went to BCH,” the girl said, blinking at him startled for a moment. “You were friends with the one he killed.” 

“Scott,” Stiles said, the name coming easier past his throat that he thought it might. “I was brothers with Scott McCall.” 

“I remember you,” she offered, tilting her head sideways. “You disappeared. The Sheriff—”

“Don’t need to hear,” Stiles said, hands up. “I live here. I’ve kept up with Lydia because she figured everything out, but other than than, I don’t want to know anything about Beacon Hills.” 

“He’s dead,” the blonde offered. “Peter Hale is dead. He killed his niece, took her alpha power, from what we got from Chris Argent, killed your friend, turned us...then they killed him. We’ve been...figuring it out since.” 

“You never had an alpha?” Stiles asked.

“No,” the girl spat. “We didn’t need one, not until that bitch—”

“Kate Argent, Chris’s sister,” the black man offered. “She didn’t like that we didn’t have an alpha, said we were out of control. Kept me and Erica in a...basement? Tunnel? For a couple weeks.” 

“We weren’t safe,” the blonde said, looking back at the two. “They weren’t safe, and we couldn’t just stay—” His words tumbled out, faster and faster until Stiles held his hands up, easing him. 

“It’s alright. I’ve got the space.” He said, gesturing toward the girl. “Erica?” When she nodded, he looked to the blonde man, who flushed for a moment, realizing they’d spilled secrets, pain, everything visceral in his voice and eyes. 

“Isaac,” he offered. “That’s Boyd.” 

“Alright,” Stiles offered. “Erica, Isaac, and Boyd, who were turned in high school, have been without an alpha since, are looking for an alpha in the area. I can work with this.” He rose took a couple steps away from the couch before pausing, glancing back at them. “You’re safe here, you know? I’ve got friends in high enough places in New York that no one bothers me here, no one would hurt you here, not sure they even could.” He gestured toward the floor, the beautiful wood, delicately carved with a column of runes each.

“We appreciate it,” Boyd offered, and the other two echoed the sentiment. 

“Not a problem,” Stiles muttered, turning away and pulling his phone from his pocket. “Not a problem, at all.” 

#

Three days and nearly thirty unanswered phone calls and text messages later, Stiles had three betas taking shifts on his sofa, his spare room, and the floor. Cora had flat out ignored his phone calls, sending him straight to voicemail repeatedly before her phone had simply ceased to ring at all. Derek’s phone kicked right over from the start, which was why Stiles found himself in the Ramble on a Saturday morning, glaring at every bright and sunny early morning jogger that came through. 

It was nearly eight before a familiar broad shouldered alpha wolf ran through the path in front of his bench. “Derek!” he called, running after him. The wolf ignored him, keeping his pace but not sprinting off, not like Stiles knew the wolf could. He fell into place beside him, an easy run, a pace a human would maintain. “You’re a difficult wolf to get ahold of,” Stiles said between breaths. 

“Not for the people I want to talk to.” And wasn’t it a kick in the teeth that the wolf was sweating, shirt soaked, but breath as easy as if he’d been walking, no fatigue to the words. 

“I get that, and I’m sorry,” Stiles managed, “But I actually need to talk to you for—”

“I really don’t give a fuck why you have to talk to me, Stiles,” Derek said, increasing his pace enough to pull away. “Don’t you have someone waiting to bend you over?” he called, and was gone. 

Stiles groaned, slowed his pace to a walk and sighed, glaring up at the overhead cloud cover. He huffed out a little breath, running his hands up over his face and into his hair. The initial lick of shame that flared low in his belly was doused quickly. Derek knew what he was. Hell, they’d been in the forest that day to talk over the wolf’s own hang ups and how Stiles could help him through them. If Derek wanted to call him a whore, Stiles would take it. 

Life was what it was. 

The beautiful part of that was that life was patterns and repetition, and Stiles smiled to himself as he cut through the Ramble, taking the short route back toward the front, where Derek always came out when they ran together. He waited, sipping from a bottle of water when Derek finally came up to the path. 

“I’m not above threatening you,” Derek snarled, but there was no redness to his eyes, nothing but anger in his face. 

“I’m sure you’re not,” Stiles said, tossing Derek an extra water bottle. The wolf caught it, and when he didn’t pelt it directly at Stiles’s face, he figured he’d won at least thirty seconds. “Not like your uncle did. Peter, right?” 

There was no recognition in the man’s face, no flare of red or understanding. 

“If it’s worth anything, I knew it wasn’t you before I left the woods. I knew when I was sixteen and saw red eyes in a nursing home coma patient, but...fear is what it is, Derek.” 

“That gives you some right to help burn my family to the ground?” Derek snarled, and there was the flash of red, the barely there lupine stretch to his features.

There weren’t a lot of people around in Central Park this early on a Sunday, but there were enough to notice red eyes and growing fangs. Stiles held his hands up in surrender, arms splayed, and did something he swore he’d never do, swore so deep in his bones before he even knew what it meant that day in the dead leaves under a moon bright sky. 

He tipped his head back, exposed his throat to the predator, and trusted. 

The alpha that killed Scott McCall, Scott at sixteen and so naive to the world, with his crooked smile and open heart, would have ripped Stiles Stilinski’s throat out, passersby be damned. Derek Hale was not Peter. 

“Didn’t whatever trauma that pushed you to help Kate teach you not to expose your throat to a wolf?” Derek asked, question sharp and barbed, but so very wrong that Stiles hesitated a moment. 

“Trauma?” Stiles asked, careful to keep his tone neutral. “My trauma happened when I was sixteen years old and stupid, and I’ve never met Kate Argent in my life.” 

A fist closed around his throat, forcing him back, back, back, until he collided with a brick fence and was pressed there, harder than was comfortable. “Then how do you know her name?” Derek snarled. 

“Because there are three betas from Beacon Hills sitting on my couch who are asking for shelter from Kate Argent.” 

The hand fell away from his throat.


	7. Chapter Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stiles and Derek are both emotionally damaged potatoes, but both of them are emotionally damaged protective potatoes, so there's that...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This will be completed, but updates might be slow (1-2 a month) simply because I'm having to rewrite a bit of plot and some of the scenes to fit the setting. Hope ya'll stay with me.

“Kate Argent is dead,” Derek muttered, voice a distant, pained thing that Stiles hadn’t heard before. It was the first thing he’d said since the park. The wolf had gone wide-eyed and silent for twenty minutes after Stiles had brought up the betas, and Stiles had hustled them both out of the park and into the subway. It had to be an assault on the delicate wolf senses, but it was the fastest way to get a vacant wolf off the streets of New York City. 

“So claims public records,” Stiles agreed. “Supernatural record claims otherwise.” 

“Peter killed her. He killed her —”

“And turned three teenagers, two of which were probably tortured by Kate Argent less than a month ago.” Stiles paused, eyeing the man carefully, waiting for him to snap or retreat back to the non-verbal state he’d been in a moment before. “Derek, I don’t want to cause you pain. I didn’t want to three weeks ago, but I did. I’m sorry for that, but they need an alpha. Maybe you need to know what they know?” 

“Why are they in your loft?” Derek asked, voice still distant, still lost. The question came sharp though, came quicker than the rest. 

“A friend lives in Beacon Hills, knew I was here, and thought I had associations with the local pack. They needed a place to run, Derek, but she didn’t want to send them running blind or stumbling into a worse situation than they were already in.”

“And you thought I was better than anywhere else, me? You thought I was—” His words came quick and pointed, accusatory and sharp. 

“She didn’t ask me, and I told you. I knew you weren’t...I knew it wasn’t you almost before you ran.” He rubbed a hand over his forehead, back through his hair to dislodge the creeping itch of sweat that was pervasive in the subway. “For what it’s worth...I am sorry to have...I knew it wasn’t you that night in the woods.”

“You think I’m pissed about the woods?” Derek snarled, shooting to his feet and pacing, drawing the eye of an elderly woman down the car from them. The wolf turned toward him, eyes bleeding red but voice dropping to a hiss. “You think for a second I give half a shit about your fucked up response to your own trauma when you helped that bitch burn my family? You think that’s what—”

“Burned your family?” Stiles asked, shooting to his feet. “Derek, I barely remember your family. I was, what? Ten? I wasn’t running through the woods burning houses down with Kate Argent. I was too busy taking care of my grieving, alcoholic father while fixing all the shit my mom used to do for us. Does that sound like someone that had time to sneak up on a house full of wolves and—”

“You boy’s okay?” the woman called down the car, and Stiles swallowed down the words from tripping off his tongue. 

“Fine, mam,” Derek replied, but her careful eyes kept watch until Stiles nodded. Calmer than he’d been and no longer staring into something only his eyes could see, Derek turned back to Stiles and gestured toward the seats they’d risen from. “We’ll talk when we get to your loft.” 

“You’re not putting a foot into my loft if you still think I—”

“I get it, Stiles—”

“No, you don’t. I wouldn’t do that, Derek. I’m not the kind of person that could just—”

“Stiles,” Derek said, laying a hand on his flailing arm. “We need to talk, but I get it.” He paused, eyes running over Stiles’s face, like he was trying to make a point without words. “I get it.” 

The fight leached from him and three days of worried Beta’s following him with their eyes soaked into his bones, and Stiles just collapsed into the seat, stared at the rhythmic flashing of emergency lights out the far window, and let the jostle of the subway car rock him back and forth. 

Derek settled beside him, and the pair rode like that, elbows and knees knocking together as the world sped by above. 

#

Erica, Isaac, and Boyd were standing when Stiles twisted the key in the lock and nudged the door open with his shoe. Isaac, like he’d done over and over again, was in front, putting himself between his packmates and a perceived danger. Erica, who had normally hidden behind Boyd, was peaking out around Isaac this time, curiosity on her face. She’d found make up somewhere, and a new pair of jeans and leather jacket which confused Stiles until he saw the opened shipping box by his garbage can. 

“Lydia?” he asked, gesturing toward the box as he entered. 

“Hope it’s alright?” she asked, ducking her head toward Stiles a moment before her eyes were drawn back to the door. Derek stood there, carefully leaning against the jam, shoulders lax and eyes their normal green. Restraint, Stiles realized, restraint in the face of new, scared betas who wouldn’t appreciate his posturing. 

“This is Derek,” Stiles offered. “He’s the alpha Lydia thought I had ties to in the—”

“You do,” Derek said, cutting Stiles off. “You do have ties to my pack, Stiles.” If those sharp, green eyes stared at him any harder from the doorway, Stiles was going to have to work on his intimidation response. In the end, he nodded and gestured toward the betas. 

“Isaac, Erica, and Boyd,” he said, pointing to each. “Peter’s betas after…”

“Scott,” Isaac offered. “After Scott McCall.” 

“Yeah,” Stiles nodded, gesturing Derek into the flat, and when the alpha didn’t move, he sputtered at them. 

“This is their den right now,” Derek said simply. “If they don’t want me in here, I’m not going to push.” 

“You’re not going to push?” Stiles asked, eyeing the alpha like he’d grown a second head. “You’re just going to sit in my doorway, announcing my and your business to the rest of the world?”

“You have a private floor,” Boyd said, and his quiet voice was so careful that it dried up the words from Stiles’s tongue. The man didn’t speak unless he meant something, unless he knew more than those around him and wanted to share. “But he means we smell broken, like if he pushes we’ll crumble.” 

“We aren’t broken,” Erica spat, glaring back at Boyd before stepping around Isaac and squaring up to the Alpha, only a few quick paces away. “If that’s what you think, then you can—”

“I think you smell tortured,” Derek cut her off, not unkindly. “Just like Cora did. Just like I did when I ran from Kate Argent. How long did she have you?” 

“We aren’t tortured. We aren’t broken. We don’t need some alpha to come in here and tell us what’s been done to us to fix the rest of our lives.” Erica’s words fell quick and sharp from her tongue, and Stiles, for a moment, nodded along with her just from the sheer confidence with which she stood there. Except, her shoulders were shaking, just slightly, just the echo of a tremor. Boyd shadowed her, and Isaac looked for a moment like he’d rather tear a hole through Derek to let them escape than to stand there for another moment. 

“Course you don’t,” he said simple and easily, brushing off the discomfort of standing in his own kitchen while they talked around him. This was his job, or at least part of it. He was a manipulator. He poked and prodded and urged until someone did something they couldn’t before, wouldn’t before. There wasn’t much different now except for the fact that everyone had their clothes on. “Of course you don’t need an alpha, someone to do things for you, defend you.” 

“We don’t,” Erica said, the venom leaking from her tone. 

“You don’t,” he nodded, and stepped forward hands splayed on either side, slipping sideways and drawing their eyes from Derek, still leaning casually in the doorframe. They’d been fine until they’d seen him, until he’d opened his mouth and tried to be delicate. “You don’t need any of us, Erica, but Lydia sent you here, and she’d kill me if I just let you leave without hearing us out? Without figuring out if this...if an alpha, a pack, is something you want. You think you could hear him out to save my ass?” 

“We have a pack,” Isaac muttered, and there was a youthful petulance to his tone, a discomfort with the idea that someone didn’t see their group as a pack. 

“No one’s saying we don’t,” Boyd said, and with steady, measured steps, he sat down on the sofa. 

“We don’t need someone else’s pack. We were fine on our own,” Erica argued, turning on Stiles. “I get you’ve let us crash on your couch, but you don’t get to—”

“I’m not trying to force you into anything, but you had a pack in Beacon Hills,” Stiles said. The unsaid hung heavy in the air, and Isaac shifted on his feet, back and forth quickly before the little, anxious movement devolved into angry pacing between Erica and Boyd, like he needed to be between both of them and the world, both of them and a threat. 

In that moment, Stiles was reminded of a blond headed high school boy with a permanent scowl and a black eye, standing between a much larger boy and a sobbing freshman on the floor. 

“You can’t protect everyone at once,” Derek said, drawing attention from the doorway. “You can’t try. It’ll kill you.” 

“I sure as hell can—”

“My Uncle?” Derek said, and waited for the recognition to sink in. “He was a left hand to the alpha. It was his job to protect everyone, all the time, and you know what happened when he failed? He lost his mind and bit a group of teenagers that had no business being werewolves. He bit them and left them to turn or die, and then? Then he left them to fend for themselves in a world where pack means strength, where small packs? Packs of three or four? Those die out because someone thinks they can protect everyone at once.” 

“So what are we supposed to do?” Isaac asked, the fight going out of his shoulders. He stopped, hung somewhere between Erica and Boyd, like Stiles suspected he’d been since he’d gotten them back from Kate Argent. “Let some alpha—”

“You’re supposed to meet with me, with my pack, and if you don’t like us? If we don’t fit? You’re supposed to let me introduce you to others in the city, and if they don’t fit, we move outward until we find you a pack that works.” 

“Even if it isn’t yours?” Erica asked. 

Derek just smiled, and for the life of him, Stiles couldn’t imagine someone taking that smile away from Derek Hale. 

#

Stiles sat on a scooped out chair in the corner of Derek’s pack-loft. Cora and Erica were at the kitchen island, laughing about the latest episode of some television serial or another. Boyd was on the couch a few feet away with Caleb and Mel, a pair of mated wolves from southern Florida who had been running when they’d found Derek and Cora. Caleb was as tall and wirey as they came, Mel a short blonde with a quicksilver laugh that made Stiles smile.

Isaac was leaning against the far window with Derek. The beta’s sharp eyes flickered occasionally between his two packmates, but he was relaxed, talking in hushed conversation with Derek and Nathan, a man well into his forties who had tried out several packs in New York after his wife’s passing before settling in with Derek and his “pups” as Stiles had heard the man describe them. 

This was the second time since Derek had met them in the loft that Stiles had traipsed the betas across town to the loft for what he was affectionately calling a play date. That first night, in his own apartment, Derek had spent until well into the afternoon talking with the betas before calling it a night to go speak with his own pack. 

They hadn’t spoken that night, nor for the first meet and greet which had gone, admittedly, better than he’d thought. Cora had taken to ignoring him completely, and he hadn’t been introduced to Caleb, Mel, or Nathan before, so he’d sat in his chair and watched and waited. At the end of the night, Derek still hadn’t said anything to him. Stiles wasn’t a subtle creature, wasn’t someone who couldn’t take a hint, couldn’t understand, and so, betas delivered and settled in, he eased himself from the chair and through the sliding door before shooting a text to the phone he’d picked up for the betas that if they needed him, they should call. 

He felt more than saw Cora’s eyes on him as he left. The she-wolf had made it a point to snarl at him every time he’d so much as shifted from his chair to the bathroom that first night. He go it. He did. She’d come to him for help getting her brother to open up to someone, someone to get to know, to love, to help the pack expand and become something solid. Instead, he’d brought up old pain and reinforced a distrust for those outside of his own pack. 

‘Good job, Stilinski,’ he thought as he trudged down the stairs, ‘the first person who he lets in since Kate and you accuse him of killing his friend and make him think you helped her murder his family.’

Realistically, Stiles knew Derek didn’t think he’d been Kate’s ten year old peon. That didn’t change the fact that there was the thought lingering in the back of his mind, the emotional flare that came with an imagined slight. By the time he hit the landing, there was a short series of question marks sitting in his text inbox — Erica, of course. Boyd wouldn’t have responded, and Isaac would have used words. 

He ignored it, and standing at the top of the stairs to the subway, he hesitated a moment. It was still early evening, six or six-thirty his biological clock supplied, and he didn’t want to sit in his apartment alone in the silence after having the betas there for the last week. His feet found him wandering the streets of Manhattan, ducking into a bakery here and a grocery there, gathering enough for a simple dinner as he went. 

The blocks rolled by in neons and grey-wash buildings crumbling into the sidewalks. They were antiques, really, protected buildings that the government was ‘repairing’ and ‘restoring’ in fits and starts that left those passing below concerned for their heads. Stiles stepped past a broken bit of sidewalk and joined a crowd crossing the street. 

New York was a different animal than Beacon Hills. It was hustle and bustle, signs and sounds and smells that made him feel insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Normally, it was a comfort, that drop in the ocean mentality of the city. Tonight, with the sun fading and the street lights hesitating to cast light into the day, it made him feel small and insignificant, just as it always did. Except there was no catharsis this time, no relaxation that came with being one in a million, unmissed by the world. 

He blew out a long puff of air and cut down the side streets that would lead him to his apartment building. The sun was long gone by the time he climbed the stair — the elevator was back in service, but cardio was important — to his apartment. He shoved the key in the lock, grimacing at the easy slide of the key and lock. Boyd and Erica routinely forgot to lock up when they left, and the little blonde spitfire had been the last out the door when they’d left. 

“jesus, Erica, lock the damned door,” he groused, toeing the door open and tossing his keys into the bowl at the door side table. Moonlight spilled over the wooden floor, the runes engraved there shining in the light. 

Bakery and grocery bags rustled on the counter, and he rounded to turn the light on. He blinked against the quick burning from the light. The standard white splotches in his vision faded rapidly, but the odd dark column remained, and he gave his head a little shake against the burning for a moment as the dark blur became a person. 

“Fucking Erica,” he muttered, and slipped sideways, putting the counter between himself and the person standing a few paces away from him. “Can’t lock the goddamn door.”


	8. Chapter 8

Allison lay on her belly, arms braced out in front of her to keep her from sliding down the metal roof of a warehouse building on the outskirts of Beacon Hills. Her bow lay beside her, anchored by the large, black backpack slung over an exhaust pipe a few feet away. The night wasn’t for her compound though. Now was for the rifle braced against her shoulder, sight focused on a man as he walked down the road a quarter of a mile away. 

Jordan Parrish had come to Beacon Hills years prior, and in that time, there had been not a few accidents where the man shouldn’t have walked away. At first, she’d thought he was a wolf. Thought hard enough that she’d left him a bouquet of wolfsbane on his desk. He’d carried it out that night, a frown on his face but hands unharmed.

“You going to take the shot?” 

The question was husked out from further back on the roof, and Allison rolled her eyes skyward in the dark. Kate had been her shadow for the better part of two weeks, and as much as she’d looked up to her aunt when she was younger, it was wearing on her. 

“He’s a deputy. I can’t just go around putting bullets in the local police, not if I want to be one of them.” 

“You don’t want to be one of them,” Kate groused. “You want to replace their sherriff.” 

“I am one of them, Kate,” Allison reminded. She’d worked for Sherriff Stilinski for the better part of two years. He was a good man, a smart man, but a man distracted by the loss of his wife and son. “Parrish is a good man.” 

“A good mutt, you mean.”

“He’s not a werewolf—”

“No, but he sure as hell isn’t human.” There was a slow slide of something over fabric, and in a moment, muzzle flash lit up her peripheral vision. The gunshot cracked through the silent warehouse district, and through the scope, Allison watched Jordan Parrish fall to his knees. 

#

The man standing across the kitchen island from him was unfamiliar. He was tall, wrapped in black jeans and a black jacket that reached down to his hands, where one of them, the right hand, was holding the grip of a matte black revolver. There was a grim resolve to the set of his jaw as he stood there, unflinching. 

“Who the fuck are you?” Stiles asked, the words off of his tongue on their own. Not the brightest thing he’d ever said. 

“I’m here for the wolves,” he said instead of answering. “I don’t have to hurt you. I don’t have to hurt them, but I do have to make sure they stay silent.” 

“Like I believe you’re not going to hurt anyone after you broke into my apartment and pointed a gun in my face?” 

“Door was unlocked. Trespassing, maybe. Breaking and entering, never.” He gestured toward the living room with the gun, and Stiles hesitated a moment, taking care to glance toward the door, to the cell phone hidden behind the grocery bags.

Careful, deft fingers caught the phone and drew it off the counter silently. He’d never been more grateful for finger print unlocking functions in his life as the screen came to life beneath his thumb. 

“You’re still pointing a gun in my face,” he said, tapping away at the keyboard, pleased when the keystrokes didn’t betray him in the quiet of the apartment. 

The man nodded, as if conceding this, and gestured again. “We could sit down, talk this over like two decent human beings. You are still a human being? No red-eyed men nibbling at your skin?” 

“There’s a lot of men biting my skin,” he said, buying time, buying a distraction. “You’ll have to be more specific, not all of them are memorable.” 

“Werewolves,” the man said, and he dropped his arm, turning from Stiles to stroll through his apartment, gait easy and unhurried, like he’d had all the time in the world to inspect and become comfortable with the layout. “I can almost smell them in here.” 

“Look, buddy, if you need some psychiatric—”

“I watched you walk them out of here, lost you at the subway station, figured I’d just sit back and wait for my sister’s friends to get back, but...here you are, alone.” He sat down heavily in one of Stiles’s chairs, and that gun came up and pointed at the seat across from him with a deft, jabbing motion. 

Stiles thumbed the send button and dropped his phone into his pants pocket. 

“Sister?” Stiles asked, rounding the counter and taking a seat. “You want me to call her for you? Let her know to come pick you up?” 

The man smiled, and it did something to his face that made Stiles think of soccer dads. Lacrosse dads. Proud and smiling and — that was a bad road to start walking down. 

“Neither of us want my sister anywhere near you or the wolves she spent a few weeks torturing, kid, but I do need to make sure they’re not going to bring hell down on my town, on my family—”

“So you want me to what? Take your word for it that your gun isn’t loaded with wolfsbane? That there’s a reason you didn’t just knock on my front door?” Stiles stood, movement quick and goading. He jabbed his fingers toward the gun, pressed his foot into the seat of the chair, and shoved it backward. The man was out of his seat and bringing the gun around in an instant, sending it crashing into Stiles’s temple. 

The pain was exquisite and sharp, hot and cold all at once where the metal cut into his skin. He hissed out a breath, and as his blood touched the hardwood floors, the delicate column of carved runes there, he laughed. 

#

Derek frowned at the empty chair on the other side of the loft. He hadn’t seen the man leave, hadn’t even noticed he was gone until an hour ago, but when he asked, Erica had said he’d been gone for almost two hours before. It wasn’t unsettling persay. The human really had no reason to stay, not with the pack taking to the betas so well, not with the betas so comfortable, taking an alpha’s direction and support so easily.

He’d intended to speak with him though, for the better part of two weeks, and yet… Every time he’d thought of it, every time he’d scraped together enough time to reach out, his own pride and shame stopped him. The woods had been a misunderstanding. They’d both let fear send them jumping from fact to fantasy, and Stiles had apologised. Derek...hadn’t. 

For a while, they’d been friends, the start to something Derek hadn’t had in a long time. Words had come easily, unbidden and unhurried, but in the few interactions they’d had since, he’d found he didn’t know what to say, not really. Not when—

“Stiles said not to come back to the loft,” Erica said to Isaac a few paces off. She had a frown on her face, one of those indignant things he’d grown accustomed to seeing from her before she got herself into a lather. “What are we supposed to do? Camp out in—”

“Why?” Derek asked, mind racing and a couple dozen blocks away. 

“I don’t care why—”

“Stiles opened his home to you before he even knew who you were. He wouldn’t kick you out without notice for no reason.” 

The silence that met him was roaring, and it only took a moment for him to check his own phone. The thing was old, a throwback from the Razr era that barely functioned, but there, on the little light up screen, was another text message. 

NOT SAFE FOR WOLVES

The message was encouraging and damning all at once. If Stiles had a client, he’d have said. If there was something wrong with the apartment itself, he’d have said that, too. Which meant that while it might not be safe for werewolves, the problem probably required one to settle. 

“Cora,” he said, voice coloring with alpha command. “You, Mel and Caleb take them to one of the local pack safehouses. Off Manhattan, if you can get off safely. Call the other alphas and let them know we might have a problem, to check on their people.” 

“Derek?” Nathan asked, pushing away from the sofa where he’d been resting. 

“You’re with me, if you’re willing.” 

“An alpha doesn’t ask,” Nathan chided, but he was following Derek out of the loft door a few moments later. This entire thing was idiotic, he told himself as he jogged down the stairs. There was no way he should be putting himself in danger for a local human, no way he should be putting his pack member in danger for anyone. And yet…

He could hear the betas throwing around questions in an ever rising volume behind him even as he slammed the door on Laura’s camaro. 

The run up the stairs to Stiles’s apartment was quick and efficient. There was no overpowering smell of smoke or gunpowder or even blood, but as he hit the top of the landing, he almost buckled with the smell of ozone. Thick and cloying and singing in his lungs, it seemed to rise from the very floor beneath his feet at the threshold. 

Inside, the apartment was well lit, the door ajar and little out of place except the grocery bags on the counter and one of the arm chairs, shoved backward and fallen. The faint rushing sound of running water echoed from the bathroom, and Derek had taken a step toward it when Nathan’s hand found his shoulder. 

“Blood,” the wolf said, and Derek followed his gaze. 

It would have been easy to miss, in a hurry. Nathan was good at the details though, his sharp eyes missed little in the world around them. Little, round droplets of blood dotted the floor in front of the chair, here and there, fat, round things with little directional spatter to them. The last one had fallen a few feet in front of the closed bathroom door. 

The running water shut off, and Derek only had a moment to wonder if the opening bathroom door would reveal something that would decimate his pack before Stiles stood there. 

The slow, soppy feeling of relief that welled up in his belly and saturated every last one of his nerve endings was welcome as the young man stepped out, shirtless and pressing the garment to his temple. There was blood in the fabric, blood smeared down the line of his throat just behind his ear, but the rest of him was shining from where he’d washed. 

Stiles paused in the doorway, took a moment to take in Derek and Nathan, before he dropped the shirt with a muttered string of curses that would have made Cora proud. 

“What do you think I meant when I told the betas to stay away?” he asked, voice sharp and edged with annoyance. “Did you think I meant it wasn’t safe for werewolves to stay at your apartment? Out on the street?” 

The cut stretched from his temple down across the very edge of his eyebrow, and Derek couldn’t process his questions as blood welled there, fresh and bright red and dripped down his jawline to run into his throat and clavicle. 

“Derek was concerned,” Nathan said when it became clear Derek wasn’t going to answer. “It appears he was right.” 

“It appears as though he’d ignored a warning, brought his packmate into danger, and —”

“What happened?” Derek asked, and he could almost watch the comical fall from anger at him to remembered fear and annoyance to something that looked like mischief. 

“Floors are runed,” he said, gestured with his hand. “They’re triggered by my blood. Anyone who spills it...isn’t welcome here.” 

“Who spilled it, Stiles?” Derek asked, trying to keep the alpha power from his voice, from his eyes, but there was an edge to him he only felt when his pack was in danger. “What happened here that wasn’t safe for wolves?” 

“So you did get my message. Good, you’re not ignoring me by rote, then. You both can leave. The betas shouldn’t come back here, none of you should be here—”

“Why can I smell a hunter?” Nathan asked, and Derek startled. He’d almost forgotten the man was there, and yet, when he turned, the beta was crouching over the chair, dragging a hand over the material of the arm and sniffing his fingers when they came back. “Gunpowder and wolfsbane and oil.” 

“Impressive,” Stiles offered as he bent to retrieve his ruined shirt. “Yes, there was a hunter here. Yes, he’s probably still hanging around the area. He was looking for the betas, wanted to make sure they’d keep quiet about being in his sister’s crazy torture chamber of—”

“An Argent was here?” Derek asked, and he could feel the fear in his own voice, feel the tightening of his throat, the rising of his claws, the flare of red in his eyes. 

“Male, mid-forties,” Stiles offered with a shrug. “Said his sister had had the betas, figure it must be.” 

Derek’s claws itched at his fingers, adrenaline racing through his veins, and no matter where he stood, what he’d been doing, there was an overwhelming urge to check on his sister. An urge he gave into as his wolf howled in his skin. Vaguely, he heard Nathan call after him, follow him, but he was lost to the urge to find his family. 

#

Stiles watched as Derek fled out the door. He didn’t need the heightened senses of the werewolves to read the fear in every line of him, the remembered pain and hard taught lessons. Nathan looked to Stiles, back toward his fleeing alpha, and hesitated only a moment. 

“I’m fine here,” Stiles offered, gesturing toward the floor. “Go, and keep all of them away until this blows over.” 

“You’ll get that taken care of?” he asked, gesturing toward his own temple. 

“Head wounds bleed,” Stiles said, shrugged, and nodded. “I’ll get it looked at.” It was all the permission the wolf needed before he was gone, through the door and shutting it behind him. 

A little groan escaped Stiles’s throat as he sank into his sofa, pressed the shirt to his temple, and dozed. He woke to a pounding headache, sunlight coming through the windows, and his cell phone shrieking at him. He paused a moment, let that knowledge leak into him as he fumbled into his pocket where the device was jabbing him. He palmed it, brought it up, and stared at a black screen. 

The shrill cry came again, and he blinked away the confusion of the headache and the black screen a moment longer before realization dawned, and he hurtled his way toward the table beside the door. The table where a non-descript black cell phone sat tucked into a drawer, where it was always kept charged and on loud. This was the first time it had ever rang. 

“Lydia?” he asked, and the sound of his own voice was dizzying in his ears. “What’s the matter?” 

“They shot Jordan Parrish,” her words were clipped and hiccupy. “They shot him in the chest, and I...I don’t know if it’s because of what he is or if its because he’s a cop or if he was just in the wrong place, and…”

“Who is Jordan Parrish?” 

“It told you, he’s a deputy at—”

“Who is he to you, Lyds?” he asked, and there was a hesitation long enough that Stiles knew. “What is he?” 

“A hellhound?” she said, but it was a question. Something new for Stiles, something he hadn’t heard of before. 

“Will this kill him?” 

“Not this time,” she said, and like admitting that was enough, she calmed. “But Stiles...it’s getting out of hand. You can’t just shoot a man in the chest in the street, not a cop, not when he wasn’t doing anything wrong.” 

“You know them better than I do. Will they come after him again if this doesn’t kill him?” 

“This won’t kill him, and I don’t think they’ll come into his hospital bed. Kate is crazy, but her brother isn’t. Allison is...decent. We’re friends.” 

“Her brother kind of a stoic guy? Goes around cleaning up her messes?” He didn’t wait for the answer. “Because he didn’t seem real interested in talking when he had a gun in my face.” 

Silence met him on the other end of the line for several long, lingering minutes. 

“I’m catching the first flight out,” she said simply. “I think I need a girls trip.”

“You bring a hunter into my business, and we’re going to have problems, Lyds,” Stiles cautioned. “My clients won’t like that I associate with the people who kill them for sport.” 

“Maybe it’s time you considered a different business,” Lydia said, and Stiles didn’t have the energy for this conversation, not again. 

Stiles had, upon moving his business into the supernatural community, done a bit of work...dabbling. He watched the witch doctor as he mixed up the poultices, and something in him just clicked. He made his own now, going to him for new things here and there, with questions about ingredients and product and shelf-life. The runes in the floorboards were laid by a heavy-hitting druid, one of the more powerful in New York City, but the ones on the window ledges, the door frames...Stiles had put those down, and the druid had been more than a little shocked when they’d not only worked, they’d excelled. 

Lydia had immediately jumped on the opportunity to...adjust his line of work. Stiles hadn’t been so sure his abilities with some of the magics he’d dabbled in were anywhere near as lucrative as his current business model. 

“We’ve talked about this…”

“We can talk about it again in a few days,” she said, cutting him off at the knees. “I’m bringing Allison. Warn your wolves, but I want her to see the other side of all of this.” 

“I’m not playing host to—”

“You’d better have something other than that sofa for Ali to sleep on.” 

The line went dead, and Stiles just blinked down at the phone before tossing it back into the drawer.

**Author's Note:**

> So, this technically this is the start of something that is about 70,000 words in a folder on my laptop. I'm not sure how I feel about it, and it took me a literal age to be willing to post. I might just go back to writing my pretty little "fade to black" universe and delete this if its terrible. Let me know your thoughts.


End file.
